Overview of content related to 'aacr2'

Book Review: Introducing RDA

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Katrina Clifford reviews a work covering the long-heralded change in the cataloguing rule set - RDA (Resource Description and Access).

The world of information description and retrieval is one of constant change and RDA (Resource Description and Access) is often touted as being one of the most radical changes on the horizon. Early discussions were often couched very much in terms of the principles behind the move from AACR2 (Anglo American Cataloguing Rules) and the principles of a FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records)-based system. We gradually move closer to the Library of Congress' decision on whether to adopt RDA or not, raising questions of what adoption will mean in terms not just of day-to-day cataloguing but the wider retrieval world. Therefore, it is not just cataloguers who may feel they need to gain an understanding of exactly what RDA is and what moving to it will involve. The title of Chris Oliver's book, Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics, will, as a result, catch the eye of people from many spheres of information work.

Content of the Book

Although this book is just over 100 pages long, I would say it is not necessary to start at the beginning and work your way through the book to get the most out of it. If you're looking for something that places RDA squarely within the historical context of information retrieval and the rationale behind its development then the first two chapters give a comprehensive overview in relatively few pages. Chapter 1, 'What is RDA?' introduces the idea of RDA being designed as a result of an increasingly varied range of resources in need of description, especially those that are digital in nature. Additionally there is the need to search multiple datasets at once, including those beyond libraries, in allied institutions such as museums and archives. Chapter 2, 'RDA and the international context', as implied by the title explores the relationship of RDA to international documentation standards such as ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) and how it copes in terms of handling language issues of catalogue records. It is just a brief overview however, all the ideas are discussed in one or two paragraphs each. Together, these two initial chapters would easily fill in the background for an uninitiated professional, such as a library school student and indeed they show that RDA is built upon many of the key concepts touched upon in library school courses, such as Cutter's Rules for a dictionary catalog.

Chapter 3 furthers this introduction by describing FRBR and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) and how they relate to RDA. In all the more recent discussions surrounding practical aspects of the uptake of RDA, the theoretical principles underlying it are often forgotten and revisiting them can be an interesting exercise. After an overview of how FRBR and FRAD are constructed, it moves on to why they are important. One figure lays out a MARC record and labels the fields with the appropriate FRBR entities which is helpful in understanding them in context. The remainder of the chapter shows how the RDA terms have been incorporated into the layout of the sections of RDA and the wording of the rules themselves. The chapter shows why RDA is laid out in a very different way to AACR2, grouping rules by the attribute described rather than by item format. This chapter is perhaps the most difficult to work through, but I feel this is due to the nature of the content, rather than any failing on the part of the author.

Chapter 4 is entitled 'Continuity with AACR2' and while this may indicate it will describe how catalogues may appear different, the start of the chapter focuses more on continuity in terms of governance and principles rather than on the nuts and bolts of the records themselves. It does move to describing how AACR2 has been reworked into RDA, rather than RDA being written from scratch and illustrates this with a couple of rules and wordings from both products to compare the differences and similarities. It then moves back to what is essentially an historical account of the 'deconstruction' of AACR2, which is interesting in itself; but it would have been better placed near the start of the chapter to distinguish better between the historical description and the examples from RDA which follow.

CIG Conference 2010: Changes in Cataloguing in 'Interesting Times'

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Rhiannon McLoughlin reports on a three-day conference on cataloguing in a time of financial stringency, held by the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group at Exeter University, from 13-15 September 2010.

The focus of this conference was initiatives to get through the current economic climate. Cataloguing departments are under threat of cutbacks as never before. Papers on streamlining, collaborative enterprises, shared catalogues and services, recycling and repurposing of content using metadata extraction techniques combined to give a flavour of the new thrift driving management. The continuing progress of the long awaited Resource Description and Access (RDA)[1][2] towards becoming the new international cataloguing standard was another hot topic.

RDA: Resource Description and Access

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Wendy Taylor and Helen Williams report on CILIP's Executive Briefings on RDA : Resource Description and Access held at CILIP on 23 March 2010 and repeated at the Bloomsbury Hotel on 30 March 2010.

The European Film Gateway

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Georg Eckes and Monika Segbert describe a Best Practice Network funded under the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission, which is building a portal for access to film archival resources in Europe.

The European Film Gateway (EFG) [1] is one in a series of projects funded by the European Commission, under the eContentplus Programme, with the aim of contributing to the development and further enhancement of Europeana - the European digital library, museum and archive [2]. Officially launched on 20 November 2008, the prototype Europeana service provides access to about four million digital objects from archives, audio-visual archives, museums and libraries across Europe.

CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Christina Claridge reports on the conference, held 3-5 September 2008, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

Future-Proofing the Past: LAI Joint Conference 2008

editor — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Siobhan Fitzpatrick reports on the Annual Joint Conference of the Library Association of Ireland and Cilip IRELAND.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 49: Technology Is Only Part of the Story

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 49.

It was rather pleasantly brought to my attention a little while back that Ariadne has made its own small contribution to the various discussions in respect of institutional repositories when I noticed a very kind acknowledgement of the Magazine from the authors of The Institutional Repository as I set about organising its review. Indeed those readers who have seen the review will have noted the references to related articles, some indeed by the very same authors.

RDA: A New International Standard

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ann Chapman describes work on the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), based on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR).

DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Julie Allinson, Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston and Rosemary Russell report on DC 2006, the sixth international conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, held 3 - 6 October 2006.

Immaculate Catalogues, Indexes and Monsters Too...

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

David E. Bennett reports on the three day residential CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference, University of East Anglia, during September 2006.

Restful accommodation and pleasant food prepared the delegates for the carefully balanced mix of social networking sessions and challenging seminars. Everyone was extremely friendly and most proved to be erudite socialites, networking in some cases with great assertiveness and sense of purpose.

Book Review: Cataloging and Organizing Digital Resources

editor — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000

Sarah Higgins learns how to incorporate online resources into a library catalogue using AACR2 and MARC, but wonders why the wider issue of organising and describing a full range of digital resources is not addressed.

The title of this book will be bewitching for any library struggling with integrating the myriad of digital resources, to which they provide access, into its organisational and cataloguing workflows. However, the manual has a very narrow focus and gives an unscalable solution, which fails to address the problems faced by hybrid libraries, with a wide range of complex digital resources requiring lifecycle control.

How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Debbie Campbell explains how the exploitation of recent standards has allowed the National Library of Australia to digitise its collections and host federated search services and provide an improved service.

The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been able to achieve new business practices such as digitising its collections and hosting federated search services by exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification, and metadata schemas for new types of content. Each instantiation of the OAI-PMH opens up new ways of creating and managing our digital libraries while making them more accessible for learning, teaching and research purposes.

The Future of Cataloguing: Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Paola Stillone reports on a three-day annual conference of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG), held at the University of Bath, 30 June - 2 July.

The conference was aimed at information professionals interested in looking at issues that are changing cataloguing and indexing. The latest international developments in metadata standards, cataloguing codes, taxonomies and controlled languages unlock new opportunities for cataloguers' involvement. They also raise complex interoperability issues which go beyond traditional cataloguing and highlight the need for the acquisition of new skills in the digital information environment.

Clumps Come Up Trumps

editor — Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Helena Gillis, Verity Brack, John Gilby and Marian Hogg review the four eLib CLUMP projects now at the end of their funding periods.

This article is an end of project review of the Large Scale Resource Discovery strand of the eLib Phase 3 Programme. Four ‘clump’ [1] projects were funded, CAIRNS, M25 Link, and RIDING are regionally based, and Music Libraries Online (MLO) is subject based.

One question that this article aims to answer is ‘Have the clumps projects been a success?’ The following sections highlight some of the many issues that the four projects have looked at and the progress that has been made.

So You Want to Build a Union Catalogue?

editor — Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew Dovey looks at various models of virtual union catalogues in addition to those adopted by the clump projects, and other models of physical catalogues.

In the not so distant past, if a group of libraries wished to offer a single online catalogue to their collections, they had to adopt a physical union catalogue model: i.e. they would have placed their catalogue records into a single searchable database. More recently there has been much work in virtual union catalogues, whereby the user interface offers integrated access to multiple catalogues as if they were a single catalogue. Neither of these approaches is a panacea, however – both have certain pros and cons, which makes the decision of which to adopt dependent on circumstances.

Catalogues for the 21st Century

editor — Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Ariadne reports on a one-day Workshop presented by the eLib Clump Projects at Goldsmiths College in London on the 3rd of March

Last year's CLUMPS meeting took place in a large purpose built lecture theatre in the new British Library building at St Pancras. This was very handy for those of us arriving from Bath, since it is only 3 tube stops or so from Paddington to St Pancras/Kings Cross. This year the meeting is split into two events, and the first of these was arranged to happen at Goldsmiths College at New Cross in South East London. This is way out east for those coming from way out west (though amazingly still in zone 2).

Practical Clumping: Mick Ridley on the BOPAC System

editor — Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000

Mick Ridley discusses the BOPAC system.

This article attempts to draw some practical lessons for those involved with clumps (or thinking about them) from our experiences on the BOPAC2 project [1]. BOPAC2 was a British Library funded project, that was investigating the problems of large and complex retrievals from Z39.50 [2] searches especially from multiple targets.

Metadata: Cataloguing Theory and Internet Subject-based Information Gateways

editor — Sat, 19 Dec 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Ann Chapman, Michael Day, and Debra Hiom compare library cataloguing concepts and ROADS Template creation.

Handling MARC With PERL

editor — Sun, 19 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Jon Knight investigates the inner workings of the MARC record's binary distribution format and presents the first cut at a Perl module to read and write MARC records.

The MAchine Readable Catalogue (MARC) format is probably one of the oldest and most widely used metadata formats today. It was developed in the United States during the 1960's as a data interchange format for monographs in the then newly computerised library automation systems. In the following years the MARC format became a standard for export and import of data to library systems in much of the world and various national and vendor enhanced variations on the original MARC format appeared.

The BNBMARC Currency Survey

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Ann Chapman describes the BNBMARC Currency Survey, a performance measurement survey on the supply of bibliographic records.

Performance measurement has been used as a research tool for many years, and as such has been used in some of the studies undertaken by UKOLN and its predecessor bodies (the Centre for Catalogue Research - CCR, and the Centre for Bibliographic Management). In the past few years, however, increasing demands for accountability to the public and to local and central government, combined with the requirements of compulsory competitive tendering, have led to performance measurement becoming an integral part of public sector management.