Oxford University RDA Implementation

Following on from Alan’s and Celine’s statements about RDA implementation at the British Library and Cambridge University Library, today Bernadette O’Reilly shared the Oxford University / Bodleian ‘s position with LIS-UKBIBS:

Dear colleagues,

You may also be interested to know that OLIS, the community of Bodleian
and other Oxford University libraries, has been implementing RDA for
modern BK material over the past month and will implement for SE
materials at the end of this month. Our MU specialists implemented RDA
in February and our MP specialists are now moving to RDA, but
non-specialists will keep to AACR2 for the moment. We will soon begin
work on documentation for other types of material and will implement for
each type once the documentation is ready.

Any downloaded records or records already in our database which need
upgrading or significant editing will be converted to RDA, but most
records in our database will remain as AACR2 for the foreseeable future,
and newly-downloaded full-level AACR2 records from reliable sources will
be left as AACR2. This means that our BNB contributions will be mainly
RDA from now on but may include a few high-quality derived AACR2
records.

We will not add GMDs to RDA records, of course, but for the convenience
of catalogue users GMD-like elements will be generated in our public
resource discovery system, as a stopgap. If/when we get a discovery
system which can make good use of 33X fields we will probably add 33X
fields to AACR2 records.

We are very grateful for all the help and advice we have received from
other agencies, especially for the generosity of the British Library in
sharing documentation and specialist training.

As we might have expected of the Bodley's Catalogue Support Services, user experience is key here: consistency and predictability of search have been considered, with information formerly found in AACR2's General Material Designations "generated in our public resource discovery system, as a stopgap."

Again, we can see the hybrid environment in evidence, with "full-level AACR2 records from reliable sources" co-existing alongside RDA records. Cutter would approve.

It's also good to see evidence of the UK cataloguing community's sharing attitude, led, as is often the case, by the BL.

Again, it's really helpful to know who is implementing RDA and the attitudes they are taking to legacy data, and I hope we'll be seeing more announcements from other cataloguing agencies in the near future.
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Image source: flickr.com via Anne on Pinterest

RDA at the BL

Today Alan Danskin, Metadata Manager at the British Library, sent the following announcement to LIS-UKBIBS:

From the 1^st April 2013, RDA : Resource Description and Access, replaced the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2^nd edition, as the British Library’s official descriptive cataloguing standard, for records added to the British National Bibliography and British Library MARC Exchange files.

British Library exchange files will continue to contain a mix of RDA and AACR2 records over the foreseeable future.  The Library will continue to re-use AACR2 records when no equivalent RDA record is available. DCRM will continue to be used, where appropriate, for the description of rare materials, but authorised access points and  other elements that are out of scope of DCRM will be constructed following RDA, not AACR2.

The Library has a commitment to the enhancement of its legacy data; including records converted from printed catalogues.  Amendments to these records will generally be made in conformance with RDA. Records will not be re-coded as RDA unless fully upgraded

The Library’s contribution to LC/NACO Name Authority File  switched to RDA during 2012.

It’s particularly helpful to read the penultimate paragraph, on the handling of legacy data. As always when considering major changes to cataloguing standards, records created under previous systems pose a real challenge to workflows, and it’s useful to have an indication here of the attitude our national library is taking to such records.

The statement also underlines assertions made elsewhere that we are cataloguing within a hybrid environment, in which RDA and AACR records will continue to co-exist for some time.

As Celine Carty pointed out on Thursday, when she announced Cambridge University Library’s transition to RDA for new records from 31 March, “We have not seen many formal announcements of RDA implementation from other institutions,” but I hope that we soon will: it’s extremely helpful to know the standard(s) in use across the UK. We know as a point of history that UKMARC has still not faded into obsolescence, and I am sure I am not alone in the cataloguing community in being curious to follow the spread of RDA: contrary to the suggestion of the image I’ve chosen for this post, in our hybrid cataloguing world, no standard is ever entirely obsolete.

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Image source: flickr.com via Anne on Pinterest

RDA Executive Briefing (#RDA12)

This Thursday around 80 cataloguers and cataloguing managers gathered at CILIP HQ to hear the latest developments in Resource Description and Access (RDA). The speakers at this year’s Executive Briefing came from the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, Oxford University Library Services, COPAC and UCL.

Despite both the Library of Congress’s and British Library’s statements that they will adopt RDA for all original catalogue records from quarter 1 2013 and the British Library’s already having begun to accept RDA records for their data service (on 1 June 2012), many people seemed unsure whether or not their library would move from AACR2 to RDA any time soon. As various speakers pointed out, one of the issues with RDA is that people have to change their workflows (resulting in temporary productivity drop) today for benefits in the future. As one speaker put it in the Q & A, “We’re still expecting people to work hard today for jam tomorrow.”

The room was somewhat appeased to hear that the National Library of Scotland will not be in a position to adopt RDA for all its processes until the beginning of 2014. Obviously, as one of the six UK copyright libraries, it takes part in the shared cataloguing programme and so will have to partake of some RDA, but rolling it out across its entire service will have to wait, according to Neil Nicholson, until things have settled down from the current restructure. Neil’s paper garnered the most debate from the floor: there was something remarkably freeing for the rest of us in hearing that even one of our three national libraries was grappling with the same issues most libraries are: time and timing. Time insofar as the productivity drop necessary to learn and implement a new major standard has to be allowed for in senior management plans and timing, as always with RDA, in terms of working out when exactly is the right moment to make the move.