Free RDA!
Terry Reese has an impassioned, well-argued plea to sound the horn before the walls of Jericho RDA and AACR2.
The Loon is bewildered and ashamed that this discussion even needs having. O cataloging establishment, did you not witness the open-publishing IETF and W3C nonentitizing (if that’s a word) the often-paywalled (N)ISO/ANSI establishment with respect to that little thing called the World Wide Web that you might have heard of?
Open doesn’t always beat closed (the Loon can’t be arsed to run a Linux desktop, sorry), but the Loon would bet considerable amounts of fish on open standards achieving far greater adoption and use than closed ones, on balance. Open is not a guarantee, of course; some open standards are poorly-written or poorly designed. Even so.
Consider also this: the Loon teaches organization of information of various kinds, to library-school students and increasingly to working professionals. The Loon avoids assigning readings that create paywall hassles, or that students can’t be guaranteed access to once they leave the Loon’s auspices. Multiply the Loon’s situation by many educators (including conference presenters and freelance trainers), and what does that say for the speed and breadth of RDA adoption in libraries? We can’t even reasonably teach this thing!
Stop this foolishness, please. Publish the standard openly. Give it a fair chance not to be dead on arrival.
I am a software developer in the library arena. You won’t want to hear this, but from my perspective, RDA is dead on arrival. Not only is it insanely long and complicated, not only is it not even available to read (which is terrifyingly dumb) but the perception among my colleagues is that it’s a long, complex, secret answer to the wrong question. The hot news all seems to be around linked data and other similarly non-monolithic representations.
RDA might have had a chance if it had got itself into gear five years earlier. By putting what now does exist behind a paywall, it’s really killed whatever chance it had.