Survey on Soft-Deprecated Terms: Please respond by 15 September 2023

The RSC made a commitment to the library community during the 3R Project that any existing element in original RDA would be retained as long as it did not conflict with the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM). During the course of the re-design, several elements were identified as being redundant with other elements or were considered to be too granular in scope. The RSC refers to these elements as being soft-deprecated.

In the RDA Toolkit, soft-deprecated elements are identified by an Option in the Prerecording section that directs a user to the recommended element. Agencies may apply the option if they wish.

The RSC is interested in how communities plan on approaching the soft-deprecated elements, and will be grateful for your time in sharing your plans with us via this survey on soft-deprecated terms. This will help the RSC reach a decision on whether the soft-deprecated elements should remain or be removed, in full or in part, from RDA.

The survey is intended to help the RSC understand which descriptive communities are currently planning to use some soft-deprecated elements. For our purposes, knowing that you have made no decision is valuable data, so please do not worry if you have not reached a decision yet.

As well as the choice between soft-deprecated terms and new terms, so you can provide detailed information, there is also a free text box at the end of the survey, so you can give context or simply a more general response.

We will be grateful to receive responses between now and 15 September 2023. This will give us time to analyse the results ahead of our October meeting.

Note: although you are asked for your email, all responses are set to be anonymised in the data collection, and we will not use your email address for any purpose other than collecting this data from you. (The RSC Secretary is in the UK, where General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prohibits the collection of email addresses for any purpose than those expressly stated, so you have the guarantee of law behind that promise).

Start the Survey

Addendum, 3 August A query on DCRM-L asked for a straight list of the terms to aid discussion before people complete the survey. We are pleased to share a link to the RDA Registry for that. RDA Examples Editor, Honor Moody, has also made a quick and easy link for those of you who are less technically-minded, which allows you to download exactly the same spreadsheet at the click of your mouse.