RDA 4.0
RDA 4.0: Description
Description overview
With the formulation of RDA, some rules governing descriptive fields were adjusted. Among these were changes on how to handle statements of responsibility, parallel titles, publishing dates, imprint geographic naming conventions, and abbreviations. A new field was also created for publishing information. Utilizing the options in Step 4 will allow you to enrich your bibliographic descriptive fields to RDA guidelines.
A large part of descriptive enrichment deals with abbreviations, since one of the big differences between AACR2 and RDA is the notion of take it as you see it. When cataloging an item in RDA, you should not be abbreviating common terms as you would with AACR2. To assist with this, MARS 2.0 utilizes several lists of commonly abbreviated terms so they can be expanded to their unabbreviated form.
However, there is one caveat to consider when expanding an abbreviation to its fuller form: the actual item in hand may have the term abbreviated. This is something that cannot be controlled in an automated process, so the options available in Step 4 mandate that either all of a certain term are expanded, or all are kept in their abbreviated form.
There are several reports available that will list every abbreviation that has been expanded, so you can find any term that should still be abbreviated.
Step 4 comprises the updates and abbreviations that can be expanded in descriptive fields.
Topics
- Step 4.1 - 245 field (Title)
- Step 4.2 - 250 field (Edition)
- Step 4.3 - 260 field (Imprint)
- Step 4.4 - Convert 260 to 264
- Step 4.5 - 300 field (Physical Description)
- Step 4.6 - Other fields
- Step 4.7 - 5xx fields (Notes)
- Step 4.8 - 34X fields
links
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