Thanks for this Tom,

Have other people followed a similar approach in terms of establishing policy? Our approach involved the setting up of RDA Expert Groups, considering the options and alternatives which are available within RDA, testing the impact of applying certain options and alternatives and looking at how RDA would be applied in MARC. Where possible, we adapted existing policy documentation to make it RDA compliant and created new documentation where nothing equivalent was available. The Toolkit workflows are a good example of something we had to create from scratch.  

Thurstan

Hello!

At UCL (University College London) I started out by comparing policies across LC-PCC PS, the BL, and Cambridge, as well as vanilla RDA in order to try and determine what our policies would be. I was keen to avoid unorthodox and local policies as far as possible, which is easier said than done.

A number of us within RLUK have also been trying to establish some form of common policy framework for RLUK contributors to avoid the need for separate libraries to reinvent the policy wheel as well as to promote common practice amongst member libraries. Helen Williams (LSE) and I discussed this with Mike Mertens of RLUK who in July 2013 proposed the following:

“With full acknowledgement to Celine Carty at Cambridge, and Cambridge itself for allowing such use, I suggest  we take forward the work that Celine and her team have done on RDA,  and use the Cambridge Standard Record (http://cambridgerda.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/cambridgestandardrecord.pdf) under licence as the basis for a discussion on replacing the current RLUK Minimum Standards For Bibliographic Records:

http://www.rluk.ac.uk/node/300. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the Cambridge work covers the current requirements of the RLUK minimum standard.”

Although reaction to this has to be honest been rather muted and I’m not sure if this has been followed through at an official level, we have adopted this approach at UCL, supplemented by information in the Cambridge workflow. It has saved us an awful lot of hand-wringing about various details of RDA implementation. Only where we feel there are gaps or we need clarification have we established local policies. Our local policy document is available as a global workflow on the Toolkit as UCL RDA Additional Policy Notes. There is still much to do, however, especially in more practical matters of accepting, converting, and creating AACR2 and hybrid records.

Thanks,

Tom