Good morning and thank you to everyone for making yesterday's discussions 
so wide-ranging and lively. We're hoping to have another day of RDA talk 
today but first please find below a summary of what was covered yesterday. 
Following this email, we will post the topics for discussion this morning.

Celine

CIG E-forum summary of day 1

The e-forum today looked at the topics of participants' general 
understanding of/acceptance of RDA before moving on to discuss issues 
around training and workflows in the afternoon. This is just a brief 
summary of the discussions during the first day.

The CIG e-forum kicked off with initial introductions and a summary of the 
presentations that took place on April 12th at the CILIP Executive Briefing 
on RDA. This led into a general discussion of ways in which people had been 
keeping up to date with developments in RDA, with suggestions of useful 
websites and other resources. The co-moderators are also keeping a list of 
all recommended resources and documentation which will be circulated after 
the end of the e-forum and will be made available on the CIG website.

The reports from the Executive Briefing included lists of things the 
cataloguers participating in the US Test and reported concerns about the 
focus of RDA on cataloguer's judgement was brought up by a number of 
contributors. There is concern about consistency in cataloguing and about 
the need to develop guidelines or local policies, as well as the effect on 
imported RDA records. There was a general interest in FRBR concepts and 
terminology as well as the potential of RDA in a non-MARC environment, 
though several participants felt that it was important to focus on the 
day-to-day practicalities of RDA in MARC for the foreseeable future. There 
was some discussion of previous changes in cataloguing practice over the 
years, from card catalogues to the present day, learning from the 
experiences of previous bibliographic changes. Many participants were 
waiting to see the outcome of the US RDA Test and the implementation 
decisions by the national libraries before exploring RDA in more detail, 
often through a lack of time and resources to do more at this stage.

The discussion moved onto issues around training and workflows. There were 
concerns about the RDA Toolkit, particularly the cost of the annual 
subscription and the level of access (number of concurrent users). There 
was some worry about access to the Toolkit creating a situation of library 
haves and have-nots. Some participants had purchased the paper copy of RDA, 
which apparently requires two binders. Several people argued in favour of 
the benefits of the linking and workflow options offered by the Toolkit, 
which could be used for training and documentation. Very few participants 
had current subscriptions and most reported that they would wait until 
after making a decision about implementation.

While waiting to hear implementation announcements from LC and BL, many 
contributors mentioned the need to time any training and the need to 
maintain a balance between raising awareness generally among cataloguing 
staff without spending too much time on training in something that was not 
yet definitely required. The lack of time was a repeated concern, as well 
as the need to maintain productivity levels through any training and 
eventual implementation. Cost was another large area of concern, cost of 
the Toolkit but also the cost of training and lost productivity itself.

A number of participants reported finding RDA records arriving from 
external sources (OCLC, LC, vendors, etc) and recognised that we were 
already in a hybrid environment. It was felt there was a need for 
guidelines to deal with the co-existence of RDA records alongside AACR2 
(and pre-AACR2) records in our databases and OPACs. There were some 
libraries leaving imported RDA records untouched but more who had drawn up 
instructions on how to convert them to AACR2.

When asked what kind of training they would like from CIG, participants 
made the following suggestions: « Basic training on RDA and FRBR « Lots of 
examples, especially comparing AACR2 to RDA « A lot of enthusiasm for some 
kind of practical hands-on element, with a suggestion of using something 
like the e-forum format to look at practice records together « To reduce 
travel costs, it was suggested that regional CIG groups could offer local 
training, with online materials made available so that people who attended 
training could easily and cost-effectively cascade training to their 
colleagues « Similarly, it was suggested that CIG could create training 
materials which could be sold to institutions to deliver themselves 
in-house « Possibly seminars to allow cataloguers to share their 
experience, problems encountered, changes to workflow, etc. « CIG Scotland 
has already offered to repeat any CIG events in Scotland

Towards the end of day 1, there were questions about how libraries still 
using UKMARC will fare if RDA is implemented as well as some questions 
about authority control. Hopefully, some of this will be addressed in the 
topics for day 2.

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