英美编目条例AACR的联合指导委员会JSC正在考虑制订一个应用于数字资源编目的RDA(Resource Description and Access)，甚至希望这个传统架构的新的“著录条例”兼顾数字资源和传统资源，将来能够取代英美编目条例，引发不少争议。作为元数据专家的康奈尔大学资深图书馆员Diane I. Hillmann最近在DC邮件讨论组中详细阐述了她的看法，说的很全面，也很有道理。水平不及，无法翻译，原文照抄如下：
I (Diane) believe the primary issues that concern me lie in the following areas:
Transcription as Identification
In the world of traditional cataloging and static published resources, the notion of consistent transcription as an important method to assure predictable access, from a variety of agencies handling exactly the same resources, made a great deal of sense.
However, digital resources carry no such assumption of stability-change is part of the package. In that environment, relying on use of consistently transcribed information as the primary method of identifying a resource makes much less sense. Resources in this environment are most often unique, and usually identified by a numeric or alpha-numeric string. In traditional cataloging, such identifiers are also used, of course: ISSNs and ISBNs are the most obvious examples, but they are generally not the primary identification of the resource.
As we all know, the current methodologies for identifying digital resources uniquely and unambiguously are still in flux and almost no one is satisfied with the current situation. But whatever the ultimate answer, it will not rely on transcription, nor will decisions about what constitutes a “new” resource likely be susceptible to the rules defined for editions or versions. It should also be noted that the gold standard of infallible identification in a metadata description is not always necessary for digital information, where the resource itself can often be viewed easily and quickly.
Reliance on Notes
Oftentimes, the RDA (like traditional cataloging) herds catalogers to make decisions about what is “primary” or “secondary” and relegates the latter to the notes area. This is a significant problem for many NMM communities, who may either have no place to put this kind of descriptive “notes” or who rely on repetition of elements (with or without a notion of order) to capture information of the same kind within a single description, thus focusing more on access than descriptive integrity.
In most delivery systems for metadata (including OPACS, it must be noted), only the information in a small number of specified fields is actually displayed to the user (and we know few users actually look at full records). Additionally, because notes can contain so many different categories of information, they may not even be indexed (when they are, only as keywords). For systems using NMM, notes information is even less likely to be displayed, and may indeed be entirely ignored, since its “human-friendly” character makes it useless for machine processing and marginal for access.
ReproductionsI brought up the issue of reproductions on the RDA-L list and was dismayed to see how many catalogers were still trying to make the case for describing an original and a reproduction on the same record. If FRBR is truly underlying RDA, I believe this bullet must be bitten firmly and these practices explicitly marginalized within the context of the rules. In an environment where metadata of different formats created using different rules (or no rules) must be shareable, these residual practices keep us all from benefiting from our common enterprise.
Yes, it is certainly true that most vendor systems do not display multiply versioned resources acceptably, but we undercut the usefulness of our data by manipulating it to overcome system inadequacies; rather, we should address those problems with our vendors.
Source of InformationSpecification of sources of information from which to record information grew logically from the reliance on transcription, the goal being consistency. Vital to this approach is the idea that resources have commonly identified and named parts that are similar within a specific category of materials, something that is not generally the case in the digital world.Similarly, notions of whether information comes from the item itself or is supplied from somewhere else are often less important in NMM communities, even those who still deal primarily with physical, published items. In ONIX for example, information about the author (from the book jacket, reviews, or other marketing sources) is specifically tagged based on the function of the information, and it’s often not explicitly descriptive in nature.
Future Considerations
As I mentioned in my comments at the Monday CC:DA meeting at ALA, we may increasingly be thinking less about the cataloging record as the lowest unit of description and more as the “statement” as the optimal unit. In that context, “Who says?” or “When said?” or “In what language?” is likely to be more important information to know in order to manage the information than where in a resource the information was found, and the current RDA doesn’t support these notions at all. I suspect we’ll begin to see this change in thinking more as we discuss common authority files, where explicit specification of language and form of heading are critical to making appropriate choices for usage in different catalogs, in the context where the concept of an individual “statement” has already taken root.
Some of these attributes are easier to manage outside of MARC (XML, for instance, supports language specification at various levels), but it’s really important that we start thinking along those lines sooner, rather than later.The ideal of the current RDA still seems to be the anonymous cataloger acting objectively using a commonly understood set of rules, providing consistent records suitable for sharing. Clearly, the sharing and integration pieces are still critically important, but we may not be able to afford the levels of consistency and predictability that we’ve had in the past. Other mechanisms may be available to improve access in ways we don’t understand fully at the moment, but we should probably at least explore some of the possibilities at this juncture.I’m not entirely sure how to where to go from here, but it might be useful to examine some strategies whereby the most basic level of RDA instruction might be more generally useful outside the traditional library environment, given the dissonances noted above.
值得一提的是苏州大学的陈家翠翻译了RDA大纲的第一个非英语版（中文版），置于AACR JSC的官方网站上。
