Resource Description and Access

About: Resource Description and Access is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1859 publications have been published within this topic receiving 10957 citations. The topic is also known as: RDA & Resource Description & Access.

An Historical Look at Resource Sharing

Abstract: IN 1634 A FRENCHhumanist, Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, attempted to arrange for the interlibrary lending of manuscripts between the Royal Library in Paris and the Vatican and Barberini libraries in Rome.' He failed. It was a portentous beginning. After two centuries of industrial and political revolutions, interlibrary loan was still a concept rather than a practice until one day, on September 4,1876, the Librarian of the Worcester Public Library in Massachusetts penned a letter to the editor of the new Library Journal. The librarian was Samuel Swett Green, a native of Worcester, a Harvard graduate, and a minister by training. Just one month later, at the first meeting of the American Library Association in Philadelphia, he would deliver a paper on personal relations between librarians and readers2 and thereby establish the philosophical ground on which reference service has been based ever since. But in September he was unwittingly founding something else. "It would add greatly to the usefulness of'our reference libraries," he wrote, "if an agreement should be made to lend books to each other for short periods of time. . . . I should think libraries would be willing to make themselves responsible for the value of borrowed books, and be willing to pay an amount of expressage that would make the transportation company liable for the loss in money should the books disappear in transit. . . . Reference libraries, it is true, all have exceptionally valuable books that they would not be willing to lend.'j3 In making this proposal, Green introduced some notions that were later to be codified: first, that the borrowing library should be responsible for both the cost of items lost and the cost of transportation, and second, that some types of material would not be available through interlibrary loan. Green's suggestion appears to have been ignored. Worse, it was forgotten. In 1892, the Library Journal printed another letter on the

Cresting toward the Sea Change: Literature Review of Cataloging and Classification 2009-10

Abstract: This review covers cataloging and classification literature published in 2009 and 2010, including relevant explorations of knowledge organization systems and theory. Only English-language literature is reviewed, though not all of the literature covered is U.S.-based. Overarching themes presented in the literature include the merging of library metadata into the Web environment, the continuation of cooperative cataloging in libraries, the role of both controlled and uncontrolled headings in catalog records, and reconsiderations of workflow in light of impending changes to cataloging rules. Notably, several relevant foundational documents were either completed or revised during the review period.