The Bib Blog

“If you were at ALA Midwinter in Boston, you may already have taken this tour at the RDA Update Forum, the CC:DA meeting, or on the exhibit floor–but please feel free to join us again.”

The tour includes:

• Description of the RDA Toolkit
• Overview of the RDA Toolkit contents at launch and beyond
• Tour of the RDA Toolkit interface including Search, Browse, Bookmarks, Workflows, Maps, and more
• Launch timeline
• Details of the Complimentary Open Access period
• RDA Toolkit pricing for the US
• Linking from external products to the RDA Toolkit

These examples were posted to the AutoCat list yesterday by J. McRee Elrod. They are taken from a workshop given at the 2009 Texas Library Association Conference called Nuts & Bolts of RDA. I believe this was delivered by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett and these are the presentation slides.

Definitely worth a look and helps highlight some of the differences to expect between the two approaches. Mac and others provide their comments on the list as well.

The Cataloging Management Interest Group presentations from ALA Midwinter 2010 are now available via ALA Connect.

• Cooperative Cataloging Expertise: New Concepts and New Models (Magda El-Sherbini)
• “It wasn’t old when we bought it”: Techniques and Tips for Expanding Catalog Records with Elements of Descriptive Bibliography (Allison O’Dell)
• Cataloging Staff Participation in Community Tagging (Suzanne Graham)
• Batch Loading MARC Records for Electronic Resources (Connie McGuire and Vicki Dillon)

As reported by Jennifer Eustis on the Celeripedean blog the RDA Toolkit is set to appear on June 1st, 2010.

The announcement was made at the ALA Midwinter conference. It will be available for free from ALA publishing for the first 3 months. After August 31st an annual subscription of $325USD will be necessary with 30 day trials available for potential users. More information on pricing is available at ALA Connect.

According to some recent ALA Tech Source tweets RDA Beta is being demonstrated at ALA Midwinter session in Boston. Pricing info has also been released.

The official announcement re: the publication of RDA was delivered yesterday on the RDA list, by Mary Ghikas, Chair of the Committee of Principals.

RDA: Resource Description and Access will be published in June 2010. While we regret this delay in release of RDA, the transition from publication of AACR2 as a printed manual to release of RDA as a web based toolkit is a complex process with many interdependencies.

The updated text of RDA incorporates recommendations from constituencies and other stakeholders approved at the JSC meeting earlier this year. The revised text has been successfully loaded into the RDA database. The product is currently undergoing thorough quality review and testing in preparation for release.

We recognize that customers and prospective users of RDA need reliable and timely information for planning and budgeting. We are confident that this revised deadline is a realistic target for publication of RDA.

Pricing and purchasing information will be introduced at the time of the ALA Midwinter Meeting, 15-18 January 2010.

Mary Ghikas, Chair Committee of Principals
Alan Danskin, Chair Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA
Don Chatham, Chair Co-publishers

Interesting exchange on the RDA-L list yesterday:

Mark Ehlert: The end-of-November goal for the release of RDA has come and gone. Is there any official word on a new date for its arrival?

As an aside, I read some weeks ago of a January 2010 release date in an e-mail message on another list from an inquiring cataloger and, more recently, in a slide presentation from elsewhere. I’m uncertain where that date comes from.

Hal Cain: At the Libraries Australia annual forum on 6 November, Deirdre Kiorgaard (ACOC representative to JSC and former chair) told us that release is expected in June 2010 and earliest implementation could be mid-2011.

Others then chimed in with their expected retirement dates wondering if RDA will be released before they go.

Implementation in mid-2011 eh? I guess we still have some time to prepare then …

This is via Ian Fairclough on the Metadata Librarians list:

MARCEDIT-L, a Listserv(R)-hosted list, has recently been made available
for those wishing to ask (or answer) questions about MarcEdit. Also, if you are organizing a MarcEdit workshop, you may use the list to promulgate information (including local arrangements).

You can subscribe to MARCEDIT-L at https://listserv.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=marcedit-l&A=1

Or send an e-mail to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GMU.EDU
with the text
SUBSCRIBE MARCEDIT-L
plus a forename and surname.

Once subscribed, you can send e-mail to the list at MARCEDIT-L@LISTSERV.GMU.EDU

Your
MARCEDIT-L list owners are Terry Reese, Nathan Putnam, and [Ian Fairclough].
This address MARCEDIT-L-request@listserv.gmu.edu will send an e-mail, not to the list, but to the current listowners, whoever they may be. (Incidentally: You can reach any Listserv(R) list owners using the same formula: Add -request after the name of the list in its e-mail
address.)

As reported by George Praeger on the AALL TS-SIS discussion list:

Esteemed colleagues,
MARC 21 Update No. 10 (October 2009) has recently been integrated into the documentation for each of the Online Full and Concise formats that are maintained on the MARC website (www.loc.gov/marc/). Changes to the documentation resulted mainly from MARBI proposals that were approved at the ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual Meetings in 2009. These changes are indicated in red in the Online Full version of the formats.

Each format also has an appendix, “Format Changes for Update No. 10 (October 2009)” that lists all the fields with changes that are part of the update.

Some major changes to the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format are:
1. New fields 336 (Content Type), 337 (Media Type), and 338 (Carrier Type). These will replace the GMD used in field 245 if/when RDA is implemented.

2. New field 588 (Source of Description Note), which will replace the general 500 note for information such as Source of title, and Description based on notes.

3. Subfield $x (ISSN) in series statement in 490 has been made repeatable, so that ISSNs may be given for both main series and subseries in the same 490 field.

4. Field 787 has been renamed from “Other Relationship Entry” to “Nonspecific Relationship Entry.”

Some major changes to the Authority Format:
New fields: 046 (Special Coded Dates), 336 (Content Type), and a block of fields 370-377 for various new elements in authority records relating to Group 2 FRBR entities.

In the United States, the new fields in the MARC 21 Bibliographic & Authority Formats will usually not be used until the changes are implemented by OCLC, LC, and the PCC.

For more on any of these fields, refer to the MARC 21 formats, the relevant MARBI Discussion papers and Proposals, and/or my last MARBI report, available at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/representatives/2009/marbi2009.htm

George

The International UDC Seminar 2009 entitled “Classification at a Crossroads – multiple directions to usability” took place last month in the Koninklijke Bibiotheek in the Hague. The presentation slides and most of the MP3 recordings of the presentations are now available.

Some selected highlights:

• Illuminating chaos: using classification to harness the Web / Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland (USA)
• Concepts and terms in faceted classification / Vanda Broughton, University College London (UK)
• Open Web standards and classification: foundations for a hybrid approach / Dan Brickley, Vrije University Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
• Visual analysis of classification scheme / Veslava Osinska, Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland)
• UDC and folksonomies / Alenka Šauperl, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

Looks like some very interesting activity.