5 things I learned at RDA11 (London)
April 25, 2011
Once again this year, it was a great privilege to be asked to chair Cilip’s Executive Briefing on RDA. In exactly a month’s time, we will be in Manchester for the repeat event there, with Tom Meehan (UCL) filling the slot Celine Carty (University of Cambridge) filled in London, describing local practice in the build up to the national test’s report.
By way of a brief taster for anyone thinking about attending the Manchester event, here are 5 things I learned in London:
- University of Chicago is going to continue with RDA, irrespective of the Library of Congress’s decision. Christopher Cronin (Director of Metadata and Cataloging Services) said in his video presentation that this was the only way that moving to RDA for the national test process made sense for their institution.
- OCLC is currently re-evaluating some of the indexing decisions they made when theyset up for the tests. Glenn Patton (Director of WorldCat Quality Management) gave the example that the “unmediated” option in Media Type seems to be causing some materials to be displayed in ways that make it confusing to tell the kind of material described.
- Terry Willan (Business Analyst, Talis (now CAPITA)) highlighted that their current offering (Alto) doesn’t use MARC to structure its data – MARC records are parsed and then delivered onto the OPAC.
- Even if it implements RDA, Alan Danskin (Metadata Standards Manager) says the British Library, for the moment, plans to continue with ISBD punctuation.
- Beacher Wiggins (Director for Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access at the Library of Congress) shared the format of the report of the US National Test, which will be available in June.
Join us in Manchester on 25 May if you can … or watch out for future blog posts here, or by other attendees. The twitter hashtag for both events is #rda11
