I agree with you that lots of the RDA “cans” currently do not make any sense in today’s library OPAC system. I mean, if we don’t re-design the OPAC interface to allow the RDA features to make sense. But I learned that some libraries did re-design their OPAC to feature RDA, and RDA records look better on their catalog. (sorry, I can’t give you an example, because I lost the email which has the link…)

By the way, what you see here on this post is just a record I keep for a small project as part of the “having staff/students assist on RDA test” at our Non-Roman Cataloging Section. The students are not library graduates but they are learning and helping us to do non-Roman cataloging. I have to keep things (instructions) straight forward and as simple as possible. This is NOT meant for any RDA training. However, the major reason I’m doing this project is that I’m hoping that our OPAC will be re-designed to fit RDA when we implement RDA, and more important, that it will benefit users in finding what they want. And I believe, even currently, by making RDA records we can provide much more information for users. and the way spelling out stuff like ill. col. etc make better senses for users, too!

A few of the new practices that you describe above use the word “can.” According to RDA a lot of those “cans” are actually ridiculous requirements (granted the publication/ distribution + copyright date in the 260 makes sense for DVDs, but for monographs it just looks ridiculous!)

The most frustrating part of the RDA testing is that no one has been able to tell librarians, users or administrators how RDA is good for us now…not years down the road when better systems might come along and actually be able to manipulate the RDA records.

Please comment on how you feel your RDA records may positively impact users. Thanks!

Would you please attach the link of cutter table, which is used to create the call # for a translation of an original copy in different language?

I think that would be helpful.