Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress
This statement is significant as it not only presumes the adoption of RDA by our national bibliographic entity (LC) but also tacitly admits that RDA and my old friend, MARC21 don’t play well together and in so doing, LC invites librarians to start thinking about the next step when it comes to metadata. I think I have come reluctantly around to the realization that RDA will be adopted sooner or later, regardless of budgetary constraints, or complaints. In thinking about this (and writing here previously about it) I know all too well that RDA and MARC21 are not the best of friends, so to speak. One of the threads that attracted me to cataloging as a specialty in the first place was the elegance with which AACR2 and MARC21 worked together, how it all seemed to click in both rules and framework. As I have mulled over the creation and testing of RDA, I initially objected, but now think that one does preclude the other. You need the rules for the metadata in order to create an appropriate and complimentary framework around it.
Several points at the end show LC’s interest in respecting the work libraries have done while embracing the future evolution of metadata. MARC is the progenitor of much of the standardized metadata we have today, in that it was an early implementation of the ISO 2709, an international standard for bibliographic information exchange. The Library of Congress acknowledges both the impact as well as the variety of the records encoded in MARC in the first point:
Determine which aspects of current metadata encoding standards should be retained and evolved into a format for the future. We will consider MARC 21, in which billions of records are presently encoded, as well as other initiatives.
The bulk of the remaining statements look forward to the future of not only library data, but metadata as a whole. To this end, these three statements really stood out to me:
Experiment with Semantic Web and linked data technologies to see what benefits to the bibliographic framework they offer our community and how our current models need to be adjusted to take fuller advantage of these benefits.
Foster maximum re-use of library metadata in the broader Web search environment, so that end users may be exposed to more quality metadata and/or use it in innovative ways.
Explore approaches to displaying metadata beyond current MARC-based systems.
It's really refreshing to see LC taking a lead role in the integration of the semantic web into library metadata. Also, I see that access to the data we have is alluded to, as well as freeing metadata from the MARC framework. I think this evolution of standard to framework is good, I just wish they would wait to implement RDA when we have some kind of new framework in place to better support it.
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