Hello!

I am currently the CILIP JSC Representative and will be following this
forum. Unfortunately, I am currently stuck in an email backlog, as our
Departmental email server was down over the weekend, and JISCMAIL-related
email only started arriving minutes ago...but I will catch up.

In the meantime, I would like to recommend my blog on Communities, where I
try to post the latest on major developments in RDA and related matters.

Alan Poulter
Dept of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/cis/staff/index.php?uid=ap
tel: 0141 548 3911

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC015263
On Mon, April 18, 2011 9:12 am, C.J. Carty wrote:
> Good morning everyone and welcome to the first CIG E-forum! I'm Celine
> Carty and will be co-moderator for this e-forum today and tomorrow. I'm
> looking forward to our discussions about RDA. In my work at Cambridge
> University Library, I've had a "watching brief" on RDA for a while now,
> following developments and assessing the impact on our local workflows and
> practices. Last week, I spoke at the CILIP Executive Briefing on RDA in
> London and below is a very brief synopsis of some of the main topics
> covered there, as Helen and I thought this might be a good way to
> kick-start our e-forum discussion.
>
> CILIP Executive Briefing on RDA, 12th April 2012
>
> The Executive Briefing was a very full day with lots of interesting
> information and discussions, so this is just a very quick summary of the
> main points that I think may be of interest in our CIG E-forum discussion.
> Hopefully there will be plenty of people following the e-forum who also
> attended the Briefing so some of these issues could be covered in more
> detail in the course of our discussion.
>
> Beacher Wiggins (Library of Congress), Chris Cronin (University of
> Chicago)
> and Glenn Patton (OCLC) all spoke about their experience of the US RDA
> Test
> which finished at the end of December 2011. Alan Danskin of the British
> Library spoke about the British Library testing, as well as giving an
> overview of attitudes in the UK (from the CIG survey last year) and in
> Europe (from the EURIG seminar in August 2010). In more theoretical talks,
> Terry Willan of Capita (formerly Talis) and Céline Carty (University of
> Cambridge) discussed preparations and scenario planning for RDA at their
> organisations while waiting for announcements of implementation decisions.
>
> Experiences of RDA Testing « Test Coordinating Committee is currently
> reviewing all feedback from participating cataloguers and looking at all
> test records. They received over 10,000 bibliographic records and over
> 12,000 authority records, far more than they had anticipated so the
> analysis is taking longer than initial predicted. Part of this analysis
> will be to determine the choices testers made and the impact of these
> choices on shared records. If any patterns of errors emerge, then this
> could serve for better preparation if the decision is to implement RDA. «
> All speakers reported that, with hindsight, they could have spent more
> time
> on FRBR, explaining the logic behind RDA, as this was the most difficult
> area for many testers (based on feedback surveys) « OCLC, Chicago and BL
> all reported using training materials, webcasts, documentation and Toolkit
> workflows prepared by the Library of Congress, re-purposing them for local
> needs. The British Library have adapted the LC workflows in the RDA
> Toolkit
> and plan to make these publicly available at a later stage « Chicago felt
> they possible focused too much on bibliographic records and could have
> spent more training time on authority records
>
> What cataloguers liked about RDA: « Extra fields in authority records «
> Explicit expression of relationships between access points and resource
> being described « No more abbreviations « No more rule of 3 « Cataloguer's
> judgement (in theory, though in reality it was less popular) « Emphasis
> placed on the user What cataloguers disliked about RDA: « Cataloguer's
> judgement in practice (preferred clearer guidelines, felt risked too much
> inconsistency otherwise) « Changing established headings (this was the
> practice during the test period) « Including copyright date in 260 $c
> (without separate subfield) « 33X fields in bibs (hard to see their
> usefulness) « Various aspects of the RDA Toolkit, including navigating
> search results and lack of index « How far away the semantic web seems to
> be
>
> Outcome of the US and BL RDA Tests: « Chicago (along with Stanford
> University & Brigham Young University) have continued to catalogue in RDA
> after the end of the test « OCLC are still working on the use of 33X
> (carrier, content, media) fields and feel they may need more validation
> rules for RDA records to improve record merging « RDA testing has shown
> that MARC is not flexible and LC is assessing how to play a leadership
> role
> in a transition away from MARC « The announcement on implementation from
> the Library of Congress will be made mid-June, with a statement from the
> Program for Cooperative Cataloguing in the 3rd week of June, with
> discussions and presentations on the announcements (whatever they might
> be)
> planned for the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans, 23-28th June 2011. «
> The British Library is planning to make an implementation announcement in
> July 2011 « Actual date of implementation (if decision is to implement)
> will not before January 2012 at earliest (Library of Congress) or
> Jan-March
> 2012 (British Library)
>
> There was quite a lot of discussion from various speakers of the
> usefulness
> of relator terms, especially in the context of linked data and the
> semantic
> web. RDA was felt to be a step in the right direction for this. There was
> a
> widespread recognition that these are hard economic times in libraries of
> all kinds and that a big change, with extra costs and training burdens, is
> going to be a difficult proposition. Alan Danskin emphasised the need to
> sustain productivity (after an initial implementation period) - there can
> be "no net increase in the amount of material routed to original
> cataloguers".
>
> The interdependencies in the cataloguing universe meant that it was
> difficult for any institution to make a unilateral decision and explains
> why so many libraries in the US, UK and Europe were waiting to see what
> the
> US national libraries decide. The impact on various kinds of copy
> cataloguing workflows were mentioned several times, as were the issues of
> hybrid records (a mix of AACR2 and RDA practice, especially with regard to
> authorised headings). There was a general acceptance, though, that we
> already operate in a hybrid environment with pre-AACR2 records and now new
> RDA records co-existing in our databases. No matter what any library
> decides, new documentation will be needed to deal with this reality.
>
> --
> Céline Carty
> English Cataloguing
> Cambridge University Library
> Cambridge CB3 9DR
>