RDA and the Mystery of the Old Clock

So. RDA.

In case you didn't already know (and for my own memory later), there has been a lot of activity in the past week or so regarding RDA. Let's see, first LC, NLM, and NAL issued their statement about the Final Report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (you can read it here if you haven't read it yet; it's the only place I can find it all written out fully. Which is odd.). It's been a long time coming, but it was good to see it, I suppose. They're basically saying that RDA should get published first, so that a "systematic review" can be attempted. Ok. Yawn. Apparently the implementation of RDA into the Big Three won't happen before the end of 2009, and that's assuming that all the usability testing and whatnot go smoothly.


Also, a lot of vocabulary from RDA has been coming out. I have to be honest, I've doing a lot of actual work lately, and so haven't been paying much attention to the vocabulary lists. But you should go look at them if you have the desire and/or time.

(Sometimes I wonder if the reason that these new schemas and things come out at all is because librarians are far too busy with their actual jobs to be bothered with this kind of stuff. I think I wrote a long time ago about this. I don't see how anyone gets a job where their only responsibility is to go out and make up policy for other librarians. I can't imagine any job being like that. It sounds cool, though.)

In Which I Ramble A Lot

I've been really busy these past few days....you know, cataloging everything. I've been cataloging a lot of German-language material, which you might find laughable once you hear that I don't actually speak German. Not very well, anyway. It's gotten to the point where I sigh in relief when something crosses my desk that is in French. FRENCH. So you know how desperate my situation has become.

Really, though, this is a great exercise in cataloging. It's very hard, but it forces me to understand the book in my hand thoroughly before attempting to do analysis of it. Luckily for these books, I've been cataloging in German for awhile, ever since my first professional library job, in fact. Again, let's recap: I don't speak German except in cases of ordering Turkish kebabs at the Christmas market in Aachen. Since that went well, though, I figure I'm good.

So besides the cataloging, I've been simultaneously working on creating html versions of our cataloging manual, and continuing to sit in on the class that's teaching TEI, and working on that metadata project that at one point ate my entire professional life but has since calmed down a little.

I used to think library work was boring, can you imagine? Funny story: when I started college, "they" wanted me to work in the archives of the college, because I had worked in a state historical archives in high school. What "they" didn't know was that I spent my entire volunteer time alphabetizing request forms by patron name, and shelving microfilm. I actually said to my mother, "I would rather do dishes than work in a library. Libraries are like math--they make my head hurt."

But since I am a conflict-avoider, I went ahead and did what "they" told me to do, which was to work in the archives. And sooner or later I learned that only student workers shelve microfilm, and by my sophomore year I was actually the "senior" worker in the archives, because the archivist moved away. And then I realized that I really liked organizing things. The End.