Library of Congress to Issue Policy Statements for RDA While Continuing LCRI’s for AACR2
An interesting announcement from the Library of Congress a couple of days back. As part of the test phase, and likely going forward, LC will be issuing Library of Congress Policy Statements (LCPS) to offer “guidance on LC policy in the use of the new cataloging code”. These policy statements will be similar to the former Library of Congress Rule Interpretations (LCRI) that LC provided for AACR2 but will be “more focused, covering fewer topics and leaving more to cataloger’s judgment”.
“The LCPSs are also being made available for the information of other testers and interested parties. Official launch of this new publication will coincide with the release of RDA by the American Library Association (ALA) scheduled for June 2010. The intention is to place links within the online RDA Toolkit from the RDA instruction to the specific LCPS that applies and from one LCPS to another as appropriate. Following the official launch, a period of instruction and testing will begin.
LCPSs also will be widely available beyond the RDA Toolkit. LCPSs will be fully integrated into Cataloger’s Desktop. Free PDF versions will be available via links on the PSD website to the Cataloging Distribution Service’s (CDS) free PDF download site. If there is sufficient demand, CDS will review appropriate print options.“
The interesting part, at least for me, is the statement found at the end of the announcement indicating that the LCRI’s will continue “for institutions that continue to catalog following the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2).”
Which means that at least LC expects part of the cataloguing community to continue creating bibliographic records using AACR2 after RDA is released. Perhaps this is a given but I haven’t seen it formally stated anywhere until now.
LC is also making their other documents created during the test period freely available.
The KF Modified Blog 