There is a wonderful reflexive Italian verb, barcamenarsi, which, as with many words in that rich language has various shades of meaning. I am using it here to describe how we are managing, coping and acting cautiously in this transitional period for cataloguing.
Background
The IRIS Consortium (http://www.iris-firenze.org), founded in 1993, is an association of seven art history and humanities libraries in the Florence area. The members are the Berenson Library (Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), the library of the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut (NIKI), the libraries of the Gallerie degli Uffizi which include the main library, the Prints and Drawings Library, and the six specialized libraries at Palazzo Pitti, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, the Biblioteca Ugo Procacci of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (focused on the literature about the conservation and restoration of artworks) and, the Leonardiana Library at Vinci, the library of record for a vast bibliography on all aspects of Leonardo studies.
We are clients of ExLibris, our library management system is ALEPH version 22. The catalogue consists of over 360,000 bibliographic records and circa 143,000 authority records mainly from the Library of Congress. Our cataloguers use AACR2 in English and its translation in Italian. We are a bilingual catalogue: the American and Dutch partners catalogue in English, the Italian partners in Italian. For subject analysis the American and Dutch partners use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) while the Italian cataloguers provide subject access using terms from the Soggettario maintained by Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
Our sources of records in RDA are monthly file loads from the Berenson Library, and LC records via the Z39.50 protocol and the number of RDA records in our union catalogue is 5274. Our presence in WorldCat via OCLC's initiative Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a point of pride for us, circa 326,00 of our records point the end-user to the IRIS catalogue.
RDA transition
As the Cataloguing Specialist for the consortium, I monitor the AUTOCAT and RDA-L listservs whose lively discussions and e-forum offerings have permitted me a decent, if general, overview of the cataloguing situation as many libraries make the transition to RDA. As time passed, however, my colleagues and I realized that the moment had arrived to give both our cataloguers and library staff with reference duties an overview of what was happening in the RDA world, and what our decisions and positions would be with regard to that situation. A mini-course was organized inviting all our staff to attend. One colleague gave a brief overview of RDA and FRBR, the Head Cataloguer at the Berenson Library analyzed a typical RDA record present in the IRIS catalogue, followed by the Casalini Libri Head of Cataloguing, who described and explained the new fields in use for RDA authority records. I concluded the event with a list of do's and don'ts for our cataloguers when dealing with RDA records, and ‘painless’ suggestions for making our records more user-friendly.
Cataloguing decisions
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• Our cataloguers have been instructed to avoid the use of abbreviations not only in the 300 field (Physical description), but also in the 5XX note fields. This is particularly important for us because notes may be added to any record in either English or Italian.
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• Also to be avoided if at all possible is the use of “S.l. : s.n” in Field 260 (Publication), instead making more use of the internet to verify information regarding place and publisher or the entity responsible for the publication.
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• Our cataloguers are encouraged to make use of the 520 field (Summary), especially when the title of the work and/or the ‘creative’ graphics on the title page in hand seem designed more to attract attention than to describe actual content. Those of you who catalogue art-related publications, especially exhibition catalogues, will know what I mean!
What about RDA records coming into our catalogue from the Berenson Library or from the Library of Congress? For the present, we have made the following decisions:
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• RDA records are not edited back to conform to AACR2 rules.
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• The RDA fields 336, 337 and 338 are not deleted. They do not display in the OPAC but may be useful in a future for which we cannot now predict.
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• The relationship designators (sub-field “e”) are not deleted from the access points where they appear.
RDA-Lite
This brings me to the reason for my use of RDA-Lite in the title of this article. Our current decision is to not take the ‘full plunge’ into using RDA as a cataloguing code for original cataloguing, but to successfully accommodate incoming RDA records, assuring a co-existence with our AACR2 ‘legacy’ records. As Gordon Dunsire wrote, in the conclusion to his article, in a the recent issue of the Italian Journal of Libraries, Archives and Information Science (JLIS), the ‘… economic constraints faced by the entire cultural heritage sector’Footnote 1 was and is particularly true of the situation in Italy.
Our reasons for not adopting RDA may sound familiar to those of you who have had to evaluate your local cataloguing situation. For the IRIS Consortium the annual subscription with multiple licenses to the RDA Toolkit, the retraining and follow-up of staff who more often than not have multiple duties not involving cataloguing or, indeed, are staff consisting of one person, were reasons too imposing to ignore. The necessary disruption to cataloguing “productivity” in collections where massive amounts of material remain to be put online was an additional reason too imposing to be ignored. Thus the decision in favour of our transition to RDA could not be justified to our board of directors. However to this rather negative list I must add a positive: the visibility of holdings in WorldCat via the Art Discovery Group Catalogue (http://artlibraries.worldcat.org) were guaranteed a continuity by the OCLC realistic and pragmatic decision to continue accepting AACR2 records.
RDA in Italy
A review paper for EURIG (the European RDA Interest Group), by Alan Danskin and Katharine Gryspeerdt, entitled ‘Changing the Rules: RDA and Cataloguing in Europe’ stated that as of the time of writing several translations of RDA were under way.Footnote 2 The Italian translation was among those listed, and was added to the RDA Toolkit in 2015. The translation, eliminating a linguistic barrier, owes its existence to the concerted effort and dedication of a group of nationally- appointed Italian cataloguing experts. I would like to note here the impressive contributions to the translation by Professors Mauro Guerrini of the University of Florence and Carlo Bianchini, University of Pavia, and their team of research assistants.
Guerrini and Bianchini have also fostered promotion of RDA in Italy for a number of years by publishing widely, organizing courses, lectures and seminars in Florence and elsewhere featuring prominent figures in the development of RDA. The title of a recent article by Prof. Guerrini nicely sums up what their efforts are aiming for, ‘RDA in Italian: an Opportunity to Join the International Context’.Footnote 3
So, given the interest, promotion and dissemination of RDA, who in Italy is actually currently cataloguing using RDA as a content standard? The answer at the time of writing this article is there are only two: our consortium partner, the Berenson Library at Villa I Tatti, and Casalini Libri in Florence, the highly-regarded vendor of a suite of library services, which include RDA bibliographic and authority records, for their English language clients. As time goes on it will be interesting to see who, how and when other organizations make the transition.
In the meantime I would like to offer a thought, perhaps a possibility for the future. The Dutch ‘solution’ described in the EURIG paper referred to above intrigued me. In the place of a full RDA translation in Dutch, a document aimed at the Dutch cataloguing community proposes to provide a ‘work flow or interpretation layer … sufficient to meet the needs of most cataloguers, most of the time’.Footnote 4 Could, perhaps, an Italian language version of this approach be the useful helping hand for the Italian library cataloguing community? Guerrini and Bianchini and the Italian cataloguing experts involved have already done the heavy work: can they perhaps take it forward with something like a ‘Dutch solution’ for the benefit of all?
