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.

Book Party

I promise to post something with more pictures soon, but for now, here’s a reprint of the entry I posted on the UCLDIS staff blog on 15 June:

Thanks to the colleagues, friends and former and current students who attended last night’s drinks party to celebrate the publication by Facet Publishing of two books from lecturers in the department.

Collection Development in the Digital Age edited by Maggie Fieldhouse (UCL) and Audrey Marshall (Brighton) speaks to the many changes that have taken place in collection management in recent years. It suggests ways in which practitioners can take an active role in influencing strategy and includes numerous case studies. Parts cover the concept and practice of collection development, trends in the development of e-resources, trends in library supply, and making and keeping your collections active. Individual chapters have been written by David Ball, David Brown, Josh Brown, Terry Bucknell, Sheila Corrall, Bradley Daigle, Diana Edmonds, Jil Fairclough, Jane Harvell, David House, Tracy Mitrano & Karrie Peterson, Martin Palmer, Wendy Shaw, Ruth Stubbings, and the editors themselves. As the author names suggest, the book covers all library sectors and is both useful for practitioners and essential for LIS students learning how to manage libraries and information centres.

Practical Cataloguing: AACR, RDA and MARC 21 by Anne Welsh (UCL) and Sue Batley (London Metropolitan) introduces the general principles that underpin library cataloguing, the history of the international standards and a closer look at the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2nd edition (AACR2) and the dominant library encoding format MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing). The book advocates that understanding general principles will allow cataloguers to move from AACR2 to new international standard Resource Description and Access (RDA) without having to relearn everything from scratch. Two chapters deal in depth with RDA (as far as we can deal in depth with a standard that is just being introduced), and another discusses Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), one of RDA’s main theoretical underpinnings. Two brief chapters discuss the current state of play in the introduction of RDA and the predicted change from MARC to a new encoding format. These, and the preface, have been written to be useful to cataloguers and managers alike. There are ten full examples at the end of the book, and countless records throughout the book. From September, Practical Cataloguing will be the core textbook for the cataloguing component of MA LIS core module INSTG004 Cataloguing and Classification.

Thanks to Facet for their support; the Department for hosting (in the Wilkins Terrace) and Dr Melissa Terras, Reader in Electronic Communication and Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, for her official welcome to UCL. Mostly thanks to everyone who came along and celebrated with us.

Word Minus Image

One of the best public engagement experiences I’ve had since joining the staff at UCL has been curating this small pop-up exhibition for the Art Museum.

Andrea Friedericksen and Subhadra Das made the process so easy – I came up with a concept – non-anatomical fugitive sheets (illustrations removed from, or intended to be included in books) – and we picked ten prints and drawings from the UCL Art Collections that met the brief.

It was important that the exhibition took place the day after our first Historical Bibliography class, and that by attending the exhibition students had a chance to see different print techniques – especially woodcuts, lithographs and engravings. Two prints I really appreciated being able to share were a proof for an illustration for Roger’s poetry, on which the master printer had written pencil directions which we could see had been carried out in the final print. Students and other visitors had fun with magnifying glasses seeing that the trees had been burnished according to the printer’s directions, and that light and that the masonry of the pediments on the building had been made clearer, just as he instructed.

It was also useful to be able to show drawings based on prints – especially some of Durer’s portraits, which had been copied to include even the windows he often included in the eyes of his subjects. So often new bibliographers can fall into the trap of thinking that the final, print version is the end of the story, wheras in fact printing is just the start of the lifecycle of the book or print.

It was wonderful to show some images of interest technically, alongside the woderful exhibition Word and Image that marks the launch of the Early Modern Exchanges research centre.

Image: UCL Art Museum e-flyer.

This post was written and posted on 25 October 2011.