Dear Metadata Interest Group members,
Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) has announced the formation of three task forces, which any ALA member is welcome to join. If you would like to join any of these task forces, feel free to send me and email and I'll get you in touch with the CC:DA chair. In addition, the CC:DA Personal Names Task Force has drafted an RDA revision proposal -- I welcome feedback from MIG members on this by end of day on Thur. 24 July. The proposal is attached to this message, and a summary is at the end of this message.
Task force to study compound surnames in RDA:
Charge: draft and submit a discussion paper that investigates compound surnames and their coverage in RDA, analyzing any potential gaps and making recommendations for proposed solutions to CC:DA for moving forward.
Taskforce to Propose Familial Relationship Elements for RDA:
Charge: Draft and submit a proposal to address familial relationships in RDA by establishing new relationship elements.
Taskforce to Review and Provide Recommendation on the IFLA Accessibility Metadata Statement and Principles:
Charge: Review and provide a response on behalf of Core CC:DA to the IFLA Accessibility Metadata Statement and Principles.
Summary of the Proposal to revise condition and option under Person: authorized access point for person:
This proposal seeks to clarify a section of RDA regarding the construction of access points for persons with surnames including some type of initialism. In the current version of Official RDA, the section header is "Preferred names of person that include a compound surname." Note that in the glossary of Official RDA, compound surname is defined as "A surname that consists of two or more proper names, sometimes connected by a hyphen, a conjunction, or a preposition," and the current policy statements for the ALA community (LC-PCC policy statement) instructs us to select the surname as the lead part of the access point, and put the remainder of the compound surname after the individual's forename in the access point, e.g. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The proposal seeks to revise this header to "Preferred names of person that include a surname preceded by an initialized part" to make it clearer to catalogers what the instructions are actually addressing, and to add an option to include all parts of the compound surname in the authorized access point. Currently, there is only an option to omit part of the compound surname. Note that other instructions under RDA Person: Authorized access point for person deal with situations like patronymics and complex royal names.
My thoughts:
I think that the spirit of this proposal is correct, but I tend to agree with comments from CC:DA member and past chair Kathy Glennan, who proposes the following alternative revisions (see the CC:DA public space, linked at the start of this message, for her full text):
- Section heading should be "Preferred names of person that include a compound surname with an initialized part"
- Add to the condition clarifying text from the RDA Glossary: "A value of Person: surname is a compound surname, consisting of two or more parts separated by spaces or hyphens" -- the current text of Official RDA is very unclear here, and this is an excellent clarification. Add an additional sentence to the condition: "A part of a value of Person: surname is regularly or occasionally initialized."
- Instead of the new proposed condition options ("Record a name in direct order," and "Record a name in inverse order"), keep the current condition option, but add a condition option: "Record a value that includes the part that is regularly or occasionally initialized."
Copy editing issues:
- Page 2 / Recommendation 1: wouldn't the correct word be "preceded" and not "proceeded"
- Header: this is a 3 page document, but in the right-anchored header on page 1, we see "Page 1 of 2"
- Fix typo on page 1 -- "It's origin in AACR2" should be "Its origin in AACR2"
- Fix typos on page 2 -- "Since RDAs introduction" should be "Since RDA's introduction"; "this rules role" should be "this rule's role"
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Timothy Ryan Mendenhall (he/him)
Metadata Librarian, Columbia University
CORE Metadata Interest Group Liaison to CC:DA
trm2151@columbia.edu------------------------------