TY - JOUR AU - Galeffi, Agnese AU - Sardo, Lucia PY - 2016/05/15 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Cataloguing, a necessary evil: critical aspects of RDA JF - JLIS.it JA - JLIS.it VL - 7 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.4403/jlis.it-11710 UR - https://www.jlis.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/168 SP - 163-197 AB - <p>The Toolkit designed by the RDA Steering Committee makes Resource Description and Access available on the web, together with other useful documents (workflows, mappings, etc.). <br />Reading, learning and memorizing are interconnected, and a working tool should make these activities faster and easier to perform. Some issues arise while verifying the real easiness of use and learning of the tool.<br />The practical and formal requirements for a cataloguing code include plain language, ease of memorisation, clarity of instructions, familiarity for users, predictability and reproducibility of solutions, and general usability. From a formal point of view, the RDA text does not appear to be conceived for an uninterrupted reading, but just for reading of few paragraphs for temporary catalographic needs.<br />From a content point of view, having a syndetic view of the description of a resource is rather difficult: catalographic details are scattered and their re-organization is not easy.<br />The visualisation and logical organisation in the Toolkit could be improved: the table of contents occupies a sizable portion of the screen and resizing or hiding it is not easy; the indentation leaves little space to the words; inhomogeneous font styles (italic and bold) and poor contrast between background and text colours make reading not easy; simultaneous visualization of two or more parts of the text is not allowed; and Toolkit’s icons are less intuitive than expected.<br />In the conclusion, some suggestions on how to improve the Toolkit’s aspects and usability are provided.</p> ER -