[CatSIG] Fwd: [rules] [ccda] RDA full draft

For those of you currently attempting to print out copies of the RDA full draft, this email from John Attig provides a very useful explanation of what has been happening behind the scenes. His final paragraph also suggests looking at the sample workflows and we will definitely be taking that advice here at the National Library. Chris Todd Chris (Christine) Todd Team Leader, Monos Plus Team, Content Services, National Library of New Zealand. Telephone: (04) 474 3093 Fax: (04) 474 3161 Email: chris.todd@natlib.govt.nz

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John Attig 20/11/2008 8:14 a.m. >>>

There have been a lot of posts about the RDA Full Draft and I would like to clarify a few things and to make some recommendations. First, I sympathize with the problems that everyone is having downloading and printing the files. I had similar problems. With several of the longer files, I had to restart the download when it seemed to hang up. I saved the files to my hard drive before printing (others have suggested a CD). I had problems printing a fair number of pages in Chapters 6, 9 and 11; everything else seemed to print without problems. There were some pages that I had to print on other printers which (I suspect) had more memory. John offered some other suggestions. I apologize on behalf of the Co-Publishers for the unsatisfactory nature of the PDF files. The developers tried very hard to provide the text of RDA for this review in a version of the RDA software, so that you could see it as it was meant to be seen. It was only at the end of the day on November 6 that a decision was made that this would not be possible. At that point, some of the work may have been done on an output format for the PDF files, but none of them had yet been created. This was all done late in the process. The Joint Steering Committee no longer has direct control over the text of RDA. This is why the PDF files were posted on the rdaonline.org site and not on the JSC site. The final edits for the full draft were turned over to the developers by the JSC Editor early in September and the developers spent considerable time and effort to make all of the changes that the JSC had specified and to convert all of the data to XML format. The JSC has had no interaction with the text of RDA since September. Second, you will note in the cover letter ("Transfer of the draft text" at the bottom of page 1) that the process of converting the text to XML introduced a large number of typographical errors as described in the cover letter. In addition, the process of creating the PDF files introduced a number of additional typographical errors that are not present in the underlying XML data. If there had been sufficient time, both of these categories of error could have been eliminated; however, a decision was made that it was more important to get the text out for you to review than to make the text at this stage. A full and rigorous proofreading will take place before the final product is released and these errors will be eliminated. Although the cover letter suggests that you may report typographical errors, my advice is to try to ignore them and not to be distracted by incidental errors while you are reviewing the text for major problems. In general, I would advise that you approach this exercise with a great deal of patience and tolerance. We know that this is not an ideal situation, but the situation is what it is. The exercise at hand is to review the text looking for inconsistencies or other major problems that have not yet been identified. I hope that you can try to filter out the distractions caused by incidental errors and concentrate on larger issues. Third, Greta de Groat mentioned the sample workflow for monographs that is included among the supplementary files. I would urge that you look at this. In practice, RDA will not be used by reading through entire chapters, much less the entire text, but rather it will be used in a particular context to create particular bibliographic or authority records. We hope that RDA can be integrated by ILS vendors into their software so that the workforms that you use to create records can be linked to the appropriate RDA instructions. Another way in which RDA can be used in context is to follow a workflow such as those provided as samples. Users of the RDA online product will be able to use such workflows, to create their own, and to share workflows with other users. The workflow is another way of guiding you through the instructions to the particular sections of RDA that you will need to apply. Designing your own workflow for types of records you routinely create -- even if only a brief outline -- could be very helpful in your review of RDA. If there is anything else that I can help to clarify, please let me know. John Attig ALA Rep to the JSC