All entries for Monday 10 February 2014

Warwick WEMI Workflow

I have created a Warwick RDA workflow using the RDA toolkit. The British Library created a workflow, pithily entitled BL Monograph WEMI Workflow, which I feel is the most comprehensive attempt at unifying the elements of RDA. It works rather like AACR2 instructions, with General Instructions being RDA itself and the Workflow being the particulars for a monograph. I decided to modify the BL workflow to suit local Warwick needs (Cambridge had already done so).

WEMI of course stands for Works, Expressions, Manifestations and Items, the four primary elements of the FRBR model. Thus, the workflow separates out these elements for cataloguing with Manifestations taking up the bulk of the descriptive content of a record. There is a section on general guidelines for transcription which should apply across the board, issues of capitalisation, correcting mistakes etc. and an index linking to specific MARC21 fields. The advantage of thinking in terms of WEMI are that RDA itself divides itself up on that basis, and because the other FRBR/FRAD elements are not covered by RDA yet (we don't do names of persons, corporate bodies and families for authority control (much)). So the workflow covers everything that we do in descriptive cataloguing at any level.

I have extensively modified the feel of the workflow to try to make it a little more accessible (the editing tool in the RDA toolkit isn't the most efficacious). It begins with a general contents with links. Each link should take you to a set of further links to workflow content itself. So if you are looking for information about recording a related manifestation for print-on-demand book, you would click on the 'Manifestation index' and browse to find the sections on 'Print-on-demand', or 'Note on related manifestation'. All the 'Indexes' are at the end of the document to try to make it feel less bewildering. I have also tried to modify the examples given either to be more relevant to Warwick (e.g. print theses) or interesting.

I have modified most extensively the Manifestation section (which is the bulk of cataloguing anyway as Works/Expressions are only relevant in more complicated cases in MARC21). Major departures from the BL standards are in Variant Titles, in Publication Data, in Transcribing Statement of Responsibility data and in recording 33x fields. If you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions please talk to me as it is still a work in progress (I have not released it globally yet).

P.S.

The two other local workflows are just the barebones skeleton with no content in them yet. I intent to put content into them once I am happy about the Monograph Workflow, if you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions on these then please talk to me.

: 10 Feb 2014 11:00 |  Tags: Monograph Rda Workflow Warwick Rda Policy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem