RDA and Music Reference Services: What to Expect and What to Do Next

TLDR: Some of the factors present in the authors' current bibliographic ecosystem that make it difficult to accurately assess the effect an abstract cataloguing code can have on the real world inhabited by reference librarians and library users are explored.

Abstract: Introduction The public services librarian who has been vaguely aware of the coming of a new cataloguing code known as Resource Description and Access (RDA) (2), who has heard of the flame wars on cataloguing LISTSERVS between those who proclaim RDA to be a bold new code for the digital age and those who see its introduction as a calamity, who has witnessed from the sidelines the upheavals in cataloguing departments and the anxiety-ridden faces of technical services staff, might be excused for reacting with a shrug when first confronting in a public catalogue display an actual RDA-created record such as the one shown in Illustration 1. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Readers familiar with current cataloguing practices and with a sharp eye will notice a few cosmetic cha in the record in comparison to how it would have appeared under Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, second edition, revised (AACR2). (4) For example, instead of "1 sound disc" in the physical description area, we now see "1 audio disc" and the General Material Designation (GMD)--in this case "[sound recording]"--is not present in the transcribed title area, as would be expected with an AACR2 record (5) Other than these minor changes there is certainly nothing shocking about the record, nothing to suggest we are boldly launching into a new era of library relevance, much less disastrously and irrevocably breaking with our past. One doubts most library users, even trained librarians, would think twice about coming across this record in the course of a typical research session. The effect is very much the same as what is experienced when the user stumbles upon an old AACR1 record in an AACR2 environment--the bibliographic record looks a little odd but it doesn't break the catalogue or open up new possibilities for research. For better or worse, these seemingly minor changes will be all most public services librarians will see for some time in RDA records. Changes in data storage systems (either MARC or something else), end-user interfaces, cataloguing practices, and the availability of open linked library-created data will have to be made before we see the more fundamental and sweeping changes latent in RDA. Still, some of the changes that will make their way into our current MARC environment will affect the work of public services librarians. I will return to more specific examples of differences between RDA and AACR2 but first I will explore some of the factors present in our current bibliographic ecosystem that make it difficult to accurately assess the effect an abstract cataloguing code can have on the real world inhabited by reference librarians and library users. Contingencies Affecting the Realization of RDA in Public Catalogues Discovery Tools In an era of discovery tools and "next-gen" catalogues (6) what is most surprising about the bibliographic record shown in Illustration 1 is not that it demonstrates the changes brought on by RDA but that it faithfully displays most the AACR2 rules that carry over into RDA. Indeed, the same record viewed in OCLC's more "user-friendly" interface, WorldCat.org, shows a frank disregard for AACR2 (and RDA) instructions to provide birth and death dates in name headings and to provide added access points for each musical work contained on a sound recording. (7) Until recently, WorldCat.org also did not display notes listing performers or documenting the time, date, and place of a recording, and in some cases replaced cataloguer-created contents notes for sound recordings with harvested metadata from allmusicguide.com. These problems and many others have been documented over the years by the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG) (8). It is not just WorldCat.org that is problematic for representing music in online catalogues. Nara Newcomer, in a review of Serials Solutions' discovery tool "Summon," as well as in an overview of music information retrieval in discovery tools in general has pointed out some of these problems. …