If you are the manager of a library facing the prospect of changing your cataloguing procedures and workflows to accommodate the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard, you may well be instantly attracted to this title – and rightly so. There have been numerous introductions and handbooks to RDA published in the lead-up to and after the formal adoption of RDA by the major cataloguing agencies of the English-speaking world in 2013, but few of them promise, quite so explicitly, to address the practical question of exactly how you might set about implementing it. And indeed this book does take the reader in some detail through the logistical steps needed to prepare and educate cataloguers in the philosophy and practice of the new standard, and also documents the technical choices that a library will need to make to get the most out of RDA both internally for its cataloguing staff and outwardly for clients through the OPAC or discovery layer. It also considers the pressing questions of integration of RDA records with the existing catalogue and interoperability between the catalogue and utilities, such as OCLC, as well as vendor services.
However, this is only part of what the book has to offer, and implementation strategies as such comprise only one of the seven substantive chapters. Magda El-Sherbini, who has been involved with the development of RDA since 2007, uses the others to place the actual implementation of RDA firmly within its context. Chapters are thus devoted to the need for a new standard to replace RDA and the history of its development; the main differences between AACR2 and RDA; the theory and practice of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) standard, including possibilities for exploiting the FRBR framework of Work–Expression–Manifestation–Item (WEMI) in a readable form through catalogue interfaces (more might have been said here to clarify the relationship between the WEMI model and the hybrid model of the catalogue record we are used to); RDA instructions on manifestations and items; works, expressions and responsible entities; and the structure and use of the RDA Toolkit.
The discussion is admirably clear and illustrated with numerous valuable examples, and the main text is followed by annotated sample RDA records for wide variety of formats, and by a series of checklists to help practical decision-making when working with RDA bibliographic and authority records.
The book was based on RDA as it was in January 2012, and inevitably the standard has changed in points of detail since that time. Nevertheless, El-Sherbini has provided a very lucid and engaging account of RDA, which will be valuable to library managers, cataloguers and educators.
