[SAA] Comment on rule proposals for archival and manuscript repositories

CC:DA/SAA/2005/1 1 August 31, 2005 page 1 To: ALA/ALCTS/CCS Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access From: Mary Lacy, Society of American Archivists liaison Subject: Comment on Rule Proposals for Archival and Manuscript Repositories The following is a document sent by Christopher Prom, Chair of the Technical Subcommittee on Descriptive Standards of the Society of American Archivists to Barbara Tillett, LC Representative to the Joint Steering Committee. The Society of American Archivists appreciates the opportunity to comment on the suggested rule proposals for archival and manuscript resources listed in your memo of August 1, 2005 (5JSC/LC/3). Our Technical Subcommittee on Descriptive standards has reviewed the proposal in detail, and hope the information in this memo will be of assistance to the committee as it undertakes a difficult task. We say difficult because it seems to us that the committee faces a thorny decision: the question of whether to simply refer users to DACS, or to try to abstract information from either AACR2 or DACS into RDA. In short, there seem to be 3 basic options, each of which has drawbacks. 1. Entirely removing all rules regarding treatment of manuscript and archival material from RDA (leaving only instructions for medieval and renaissance manuscripts, if needed) with pointers to appropriate standards such as DACS and ISAD(G). 2. Including (in some yet to be written section of RDA) an unambiguous ...