RDA: Imminent Debacle is an opinion piece by Michael Gorman in the December 2007 issue of American Libraries appearing on page 64.
My blog post here is not to pass judgment on the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) or on the current Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules AACR2.
What I do want to address is Mr. Gorman’s interesting vocabulary and his literary and cultural allusions in his article on cataloging.
Vocabulary
Mr. Gorman’s article is the first time I’ve seen the terms neophilia and neophiliacs in print. I bet I’ll see them soon on freerice.com, a site that builds vocabulary. Since he is writing in American Libraries, a magazine aimed at people with masters degrees, most of his readers will recognize neophilia not as a physical disease, but as a love of anything new. Being a neophiliac does sound like someone with a serious problem and I have no doubt Mr. Gorman intends that meaning.
I needed to pull out my dictionary when Mr. Gorman got to “undigested gobbets.” According to the Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edition revised), a gobbet is “1. a piece or lump of flesh, food, or viscous matter. or 2. an extract from a text, especially one set for translation or comment in an examination. ” In the context of the article, I believe Mr. Gorman is referring to second definition. As a non-cataloger who has used AACR2 under duress, I lean towards “viscous matter.”
Literary/Cultural References
I identified four cultural or literary references in Mr. Gorman’s article, but I only knew (or felt I knew) two right off:
Rovian Blather – According to the article itself, “blather that always accompanies excuses for failed policy decisions.” I wonder if this term referring to presidential adviser Karl Rove will stand the test of time. Could be that 20 years from now people will say “Rovian what?”
Laputan FRBR – Mr. Gorman uses the term Laputan to describe the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. While I know that Laputan refers to the Island of Laputa written about by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travel’s, I thought this allusion might be lost on some of Mr. Gorman’s readers. If you want to read about Laputa yourself, click the link above. If not, suffice it to say that the Laputans are people that value theory over facts and this preference makes them do fairly crazy things.
So much for my own knowledge. Here are two more that I was unclear on when I first started reading:
boogie-woogie Google boys – Ok. This is a play on “boogie-woogie bugle boys of company B” from World War II, but what does that have to do with metadata?
Big Yellow Taxi time – The context is “Maybe it is Big Yellow Taxi time for cataloging — and we won’t know what we’ve got ’til it’s gone.” This might be a Joni Mitchell song, at least according to Wikipedia. Part of the article seems to hint at what Mr. Gorman may be aiming at:
In many covers the departed one may be interpreted as variously a boyfriend, a husband, or a father. Sometimes they are merely walking out on the singer; other times it is implied they are being taken away by authorities. This lends the song an almost dystopian feel.
But I’m not sure. Still, you have to admire someone who can weave current events, Jonathan Swift and Joni Mitchell into a single article on cataloging.
Filed under: librarians, librarianship | Tagged: cataloging, culture
I’ll say “Big Yellow Taxi time” is certainly a Joni Mitchell reference, for the song’s chorus lines “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
It’s hard to think of those lines in cataloging terms, as opposed to the final chorus line, “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” Maybe I just don’t see current cataloging practice as paradise–or RDA proposals as a parking lot.
Personally, I thought the article was, well, a bit overwrought. But, of course, I’m not a cataloger, and (unlike AACRII) have no intention of reading RDA cover to cover.
Hi Walt, thanks for sharing the lyrics with me.
One problem I had with the article was that it appeared to be unintelligible to non-catalogers. I took a basic cataloging course in the mid-1990s where I had to use AACR2. I did a little copy cataloging in the late 1990s. These days I confine myself to knowing MARC fields and keeping up on FRBR and other new cataloging approaches in general terms. But most of the article still went over my head in the sense that I didn’t get what Mr. Gorman saw so beautiful and simple about AACR2.
Without getting a sense of what was so right about AACR2, I couldn’t really follow his criticisms of RDA. In fact, as a casual user of AACR2, I find it about as helpful in making cataloging decisions as Mr. Gorman appears to find RDA. It seems positively Byzantine to me. But I chalk that up to not being a cataloging.
On the other hand, his use of language really intrigued me since I’ve been doing reading on cultural and religious literacy, as well as working on my vocabulary. Hence, my decision to examine his references while passing on the cataloging aspects.