Coyle and Hillmann were referring to the inadequacies of AACR2, but their article is really a
harsh criticism of RDA. This is largely because, at the time the article was written, RDA appeared to
be nothing more than a set of cataloguing guidelines dressed up in AACR clothing. The authors felt
that the profession had progressed very little from the early 1980s: “Since the development of the first
OPACs, libraries have been trying to move forward while dragging behind them the ball of a century of
legacy data and the chain of an antiquated view of the bibliographic universe.”9 This sums up the
problem nicely and clearly states the challenges that face the profession. At this stage it is hard to make
a clean break from the past because we have invested so much energy into our AACR/ISBD/MARC
past.