Dear all,

I'd like to repeat Helen's words of thanks for all your input and 
enthusiasm during our first-ever CIG E-forum. We both very much enjoyed 
co-moderating the discussions and have lots of interesting ideas about 
training and future e-forum topics to take away with us. We hope you all 
found it useful too and welcome any comments or feedback.

Please find below a summary of the discussions from yesterday - there was 
so much ground covered it has been hard to summarise as briefly as I would 
have liked. We are also going to post a review of the whole e-forum on the 
CIG blog, where we will also add news about any future RDA training from 
CIG, so look out there for further information.

http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/catalogueandindex/default.aspx

As Helen stated, this email list will only be used for e-forum messages, so 
feel free to remain subscribed and you will hear news of the next CIG 
e-forum topic and dates in the next few months.

Thanks again,

Celine

*******

CIG E-forum on RDA: Day 2 discussion

The morning topics of discussion centred around vendors, record supply 
issues, LMS, OPAC. There were questions about how vendors might cope with 
operating in a hybrid AACR2 and RDA environment, particularly as it seems 
unlikely that all their clients would switch to RDA at the same time (or at 
all). Lesley Creamer of BDS said that supplying records containing the new 
RDA-related MARC tags were not a problem but of course that libraries 
needed to have these records accepted in their LMS. BDS will attempt to 
follow the British Library but they do have concerns about maintaining 
productivity, especially with the implications of the loss of the 'rule of 
3' and associated authority work.

There was some discussion of European vendors and their readiness for RDA. 
No answers were available during the discussion though the high level of 
interest in Europe (evidenced at the EURIG seminar in August 2010) suggests 
that libraries should be at least able to expect a level of awareness from 
European vendors.

It was recognised that libraries needed to think about what questions they 
wanted to ask of their LMS suppliers. There was even some question of 
whether new resource discovery layers (like Primo) make all the changes in 
RDA redundant since they achieve the same aims by different means.

There was a feeling that incorporating RDA records would not be 
significantly more complicated than the situation which currently exists, 
where (for example) there is variant practice in AACR2 records for things 
like having print and electronic books on a single record or separately. 
The BL's experience was that AACR2 and RDA records sat together quite 
happily in Aleph and the hybrid environment caused no problems with either 
bibliographic or authority data. The BL has had to do work on batch upgrade 
routines, merge profiles and adding some post-processing fixes to avoid 
creating hybrid RDA/AACR2 records during overlay. There was some concern 
expressed by participants about record matching or deduplication, so these 
areas may be something other libraries need to investigate with their LMS 
supplier.

The flexibility of the new RDA content/carrier fields over GMD was 
mentioned, particularly since this information is removed from the display 
of the title where GMD currently sits. However, there were no examples 
available of LMS/OPACs which had already converted the 336-338 fields to 
some kind of icon or visual display

There was also a question about whether RDA records might prove more useful 
to end users in terms of the extra information provided and, if they did, 
would that users then make inferences from the lack of this extra 
information in non-RDA records. Some libraries currently maintain separate 
databases for sets of records of significantly different quality, so could 
this possibly apply to RDA/non-RDA records too if, for example, FRBRization 
of the catalogue was easier with RDA records.

In the afternoon, discussion moved on to issues around implementation. 
There were questions about problems that may be caused if LC and the BL 
implement RDA in different ways. RDA contains more options and alternatives 
than we are used to AACR2 (though it was pointed out that the 
interpretation of AACR2 is not entirely consistent either). The BL do aim 
for consistency but have to focus limited resources on real benefits and 
must accept divergence elsewhere, so will not follow all of the Library of 
Congress Policy Statements any more than they followed all of the LCRIs.

In practical terms, the BL policy should they adapt RDA would be to 
continue to accept AACR2 records where they satisfy quality criteria, so 
this would also be an option for other libraries.

No library has plans to implement RDA regardless of the decision of the 
national libraries. Cambridge University Library pointed out that it would 
be very difficult for them to move in a different direction to the BL, 
because of their participation in the Legal Deposit Libraries Shared 
Cataloguing Programme and other libraries have other relationships and 
interdependencies to take into account.

In a world of linked data and the semantic web, it was suggested that there 
would also be costs of not implementing RDA and of being left in an even 
deeper silo. The transition to RDA was compared to moving from the card 
catalogue to MARC, which was also expensive in time and other costs: the 
full benefits of MARC were possibly not apparent until the arrival of the 
internet decades later, but some benefits did accrue immediately. There was 
a repetition of the need to overhaul or replace MARC, which had been raised 
at the Executive Briefing.

A number of topics were carried over from the first day of the e-forum: a 
discussion of the notion of "edition" in the FRBR model and in RDA 
(detailed responses can be found on this from Anne Welsh, Alan Danskin & 
Gordon Dunsire, which we won't attempt to summarise here).

There was reiteration of the problems faced by smaller institutions in 
accessing the RDA Toolkit and therefore their ability to move with other 
libraries if RDA is generally adopted.

Finally, Anne Welsh (UCL) suggested a possible model for hands-on online 
training using the e-forum format. There was a great deal of enthusiasm for 
this idea from e-forum participants, with suggestions on content, format of 
material and timing, so these ideas have been compiled and will be reported 
to the next CIG committee meeting in June.


-- 
Céline Carty
English Cataloguing
Cambridge University Library
Cambridge CB3 9DR