Quite interesting to learn that, after all the build-up and fooferaw, it's still possible that the entire thing could be shot down. Mainly riding on Library of Congress' decision about it ... if they decide they don't like the new rules, then, since most North American libraries get their cataloguing information from LC, virtually nobody else will adopt it either. So we could be getting all excited/stressed about nothing.
On one point my opinion has not changed ... I still have the impression that 3/4 of the time and money spent prepping for and designing RDA was consumed by coming up with pompous terminology rather than practicalities. But that's just my cynical, appreciative-of-plain-English side talking and my suspicion that many (not all, but many) committees are made up of the people that sensible folk are dying to get out of the office for a few hours each month so they can uninterruptedly get on with accomplishing something useful). ;p
There are quite a few features I like. All the Latin is gone (yes, non-library-employed readers, the previous set of rules also suffered so badly from pomposity that there was oh-so-useful-and-meaningful-to-the-gener
Am also glad to see the gmd gone, but not terribly impressed by the 336/337/338 fields that are replacing it ... damned clumsy those are, not to mention being a major typo minefield.
Overall, the big pluses are the information in the catalogue being far more geared towards clarity for the patrons rather than using arcane terminology that only had meaning for the library-trained. The big minus is the overkill on the record-exactly-as-on-the-item-every-litt
So overall, the pluses outnumber the minuses, but the few minuses are major ones (there are a few more, such as the proposed new method of recording author info potentially violating this province's Privacy Act, but I'm not gonna bore you with that here)
Gonna put in some weekend time whipping all my scribbles into a quick outline for my team, and hopefully getting started on charting the big changes into a new section of my department's internal webpage. Funfunfun!!!
But first things first ... today's mail included the newly-published volume six of Empowered and I do think reading that takes priority over note transcription. ;-) And I brought home a fresh wad of book notes for
catdesk ... need to get the new list for that posted as well. 