[yul-naco] Forthcoming PCC Policy on Relationship Designators

[Arakawa, Steven]

This is not technically NACO related, but I thought this would be the best way to alert all catalogers who have had the RDA training.

I haven't absorbed all of this yet, but early warning:

It appears that relationship designators for creators will be mandatory in pcc bibliographic records. I have highlighted the relevant section in 3.4. of the document.  The document report is a list of recommendations, but it was approved in a conference call by the PCC Policy Committee (PoCo) Nov. 2. The list of designators relevant to creators is in RDA Appendix I.

3.4 To update legacy data
The Task Group believes relationship designators will prove useful to systems and users, but is concerned that a 'critical mass' of records containing relationship designators may be necessary before the benefit will be consistent across a catalog or discovery service. For example, if a search interface offers a facet or limit based on relationship designators but few records contain them, the user may be given a false impression that there are no records for a given composer because a relationship designator was not given. It is for this reason that the Task Group has recommended mandatory use for creators from RDA Appendix I, and strongly encourages others, in PCC records. It is our hope that legacy records may be enhanced to supply this information whenever possible using automated means, and encourages collaborative groups and bibliographic utilities to consider automated approaches that might supplement terms added by individual catalogers. Some conversion of existing MARC relator terms or codes may be possible, and it may also be possible to infer them from other data in the record in some, but not all, cases.
For whatever reason, the report was issued in rich text rather than .doc or docx, so it needs to be opened in Wordpad, which should be on all workstations.

It's not yet in the LCPS; I just learned about it while catching up on the standards committee wiki this afternoon where there has been a discussion regarding how this will be worded in the LCPS. As far as I know the PCC practice will simply differ from the LC practice. Part of the current discussion is whether to extend the requirement to contributors (e.g. editors of compilations).  It doesn't need to be followed until it appears in LCPS officially.

Although current NACO policy is not to include relationship designators in NARs, I am not yet clear on whether the policy change creates an exception for author/title NARs.

Steven Arakawa
Catalog Librarian for Training & Documentation
Catalog & Metadata Services, SML, Yale University
P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240
(203)432-8286 steven.arakawa at yale.edu

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