Cataloging

Cataloging Jay Weitz (bio) More than two decades ago as he looked back at "the major developments in library music cataloging during the recent past," our beloved friend and colleague, the late A. Ralph Papakhian, marveled at "the application of computer and networking technologies and the corresponding organizational efforts to promote cooperative cataloging in that environment."1 Among other highlights, he cited the NACO (Name Authority Cooperative) Music Project (NMP) (in the creation of which he played no small part), the standardization of descriptive conventions in the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR), the implementation of the MARC music format, and the cooperative networking of OCLC and the Research Library Group (RLG). Now well over twenty years into the twenty-first century, we can in turn marvel at what W. B. Yeats called "what is past, or passing, or to come."2 It is instructional to look through the index of Music Librarianship at the Turn of the Century, the book version of the essays, including Papakhian's, originally published as the March 2000 issue of Notes. In the index, we note some of the things important at the time that have since passed: the Research Library Group (RLG) and its Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, and OCLC's Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC), to name a few. In the index, we find other things of great importance that drew only passing attention in the essays: BIBCO, SACO, ISBD, and user diversity, for instance. And conspicuous by their absence in the index, we miss things still in their infancy that were passed over all together—Google and the Functional Requirements trilogy of conceptual models, for example—or yet to be conceived, most consequentially, Resource Description and Access (RDA). [End Page 29] RESOURCE DESCRIPTION AND ACCESS AND "CATALOGING SIMPLIFICATION" If one had to choose a single dominant force that drove music—and all—cataloging during this period, it would certainly have to be the tumultuous birth, development, and institutionalization of RDA. Published in its original form in 2010, "RDA is built on foundations established by the Anglo-American cataloguing rules. 2nd edition (AACR2) and the cataloguing traditions on which it was based."3 It is designed to be "a package of data elements, guidelines, and instructions for creating library and cultural heritage metadata that are well-formed according to international models. … RDA is designed to take advantage of the efficiencies and flexibility in data capture, storage, retrieval, and display made possible with new database technologies. RDA is also designed to be compatible with the legacy technologies still used in many resource discovery applications."4 In cataloging circles, the first two decades of the new century were consumed with debate about, argument over, and multiple reformulations of RDA. And that was just the beginning. Many will remember that what would evolve into RDA began to take conceptual shape with the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR,5 popularly known as the Toronto Conference, held in October 1997 and sponsored by the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR (JSC). More principle-based cataloging was a central focus of the early work to create a more streamlined third edition of AACR. A foundational phrase in the air at the time was "cataloging simplification," perhaps best exemplified by the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access Task Force on Consistency Across Part I of AACR2. Formed in February 2002, this task force was charged with determining which rules could be generalized and which truly deserved their specificity.6 Although the special needs of musical resources were by no means the sole or even the most prominent rationale, they surely played a part in the April 2005 decision by the JSC on a "change of direction"7 for what was briefly titled "AACR3: Resource Description and Access." [End Page 30] In 2007, a completely revamped structure for RDA, more closely aligned with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR),8 was proposed. Throughout the early development of RDA, music constituencies ranging from the Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC) of the Music Library Association (MLA) to the NMP Advisory Committee to the International Association...