EURIG IN ATHENS

Jenny Wright, Chief Metadata Officer at BDS and newly elected Chair of the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG), reports on the Group’s annual meeting.

For the first time since May 2019, the members of EURIG, which comprises 52 members from 31 countries, had their annual meeting in person. Hosted by the National Library of Greece, at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, the chance to meet face to face and have conversations over coffee was appreciated by all who were able to attend. Since there are still some issues with international travel, some colleagues also joined us via Zoom.

Roberto Gómez Prada, National Library of Spain, Chair of EURIG, welcomed all delegates with an acknowledgement that it would take time for the dynamics of in-person meetings to recover. He gave thanks to the National Library of Greece for accommodating the late development of adding an online component to the meeting.

Many issues revolving around the implementation of RDA were discussed and a detailed report of every presentation is not possible here but some that readers might find interesting are described below.

Non-Latin scripts

Ahava Cohen, National Library of Israel and current European representative on the RSC, presented on the issues involved with cataloguing in non-Latin scripts. Many institutions in language communities which do not use Latin script are only applying RDA to the cataloguing of Latin script resources.

Some of the assumptions made by the Latin-scriptcentric RDA are that all scripts have bicamerality ( the use of upper and lower cases); diacritics; letters; numbers as numerals; and punctuation (in some languages, a comma is not a comma, and the question mark is not the only punctuation that can go “backto-front”).

The language of RDA has unintended pejorative connotations (for example, describing native languages as vernacular) and does not have the scope to allow for the diversity that differing scripts bring. The RSC is responsive to feedback, but it’s only when those working on right to left/bottom to top/nonLatin scripts actually try to work in RDA that some problems come to light.

National Library of Greece

Michalis Geromis of the National Library of Greece described the work he and his colleagues have been doing with their catalogue.

The world knows that Greek civilization has had an enormous impact on the modern world, but there are relatively few bibliographic records for Greek resources in their system.

The National Library of Greece (EBE) has undertaken an ambitious programme to move from Unimarc to MARC21 with a new ILS, work with linked data, and implement RDA, not quite simultaneously but overlapping projects in a short timeframe. It has been challenging to change the culture of cataloguing, but output has much improved.

Future Plans

The drive to achieve true internationalisation of RDA continues. With its base in AACR2, RDA has significant biases and the areas identified as problematic have been moved into Community Resources in the Toolkit as a temporary measure. Working Groups on Religion, Extent, Official Languages and Place have been working on relevant development, and the Community Zone will become an area that can be filled directly by user communities.

Special Thanks

In his final address to the group before I take on the role as Chair of EURIG, Roberto Gómez Prada gave a special thank you to members Alan Danskin, Thierry Clavel, Leif Andresen, and Bernhard Schubert. Although they are leaving EURIG, their contribution over the years has been much appreciated.