Is RDA on Your RaDAr?

The proliferation of bibliographic description standards seems to be offering more chaos than certainty. But how those standards are applied in our new environment is quite different from what we're used to in our comfortable MARC silo. How we think about this new environment can do much to reassure us that it is not as chaotic as it looks. In particular, the development of semantic maps and mapping services will assist us to expand our view of this new environment and reveal the opportunities provided there.

Has RDA slowed you down? RDA practices may require extra data entry compared to AACR2. There's no shortcut to learning a new standard, but macros and other tools can speed up data entry. Susan will also share favorite resources to simplify life with RDA.

St. Olaf College recently worked with Backstage on RDA enrichment for a catalog of 2 million bibliographic records. The college continues to add RDA elements to incoming catalog records as part of its regular batch processing with Backstage. Sarah Beth Weeks will tell about the process and relate how the RDA enrichment has affected the library catalog and the user experience. Nate Cothran will take you behind the scenes to look at how the Backstage authority control engine was adapted to facilitate RDA enrichment.

RDA has changed the character of name authority records. Whereas the traditional authority record was a method of controlling the names used in bibliographic records, the new authority record provides an enhanced description of a person, family, corporate body, work or expression. RDA provides a variety of elements for such descriptions, and NACO policies are encouraging the use of these fields. Thus far, however, there has been little discussion of how to display and index these enhanced descriptions for public use. This presentation describes the new data elements, discusses issues relating to display and indexing, and speculates on the implications of linked data for the creation and maintenance of these new authority records.

The implementation of RDA in the Cataloging and Metadata Unit of the Baylor University Libraries occurred amid much change, both within the unit and the libraries as a whole. Over the course of the past year, staff have undergone a library-wide reorganization, transitioned from our previous ILS to a new library service platform, launched a new web-scale discovery service, and successfully concluded our search for a Metadata and Catalog Librarian, a position the library had been without for over a year.

Despite these disruptions, Evans and Yanos devised and carried out RDA training for both original and copy catalogers in their unit that resulted in only a brief reduction in productivity. In their presentation they will outline their RDA implementation and training strategies, share some of their local policy decisions, address some of the challenges they continue to face in their use of RDA, and discuss what they need to do next. Evans and Yanos' hope is that institutions who have not yet adopted RDA will be able to apply some of Baylor's strategies in their cataloging departments.

The national libraries of United States started their implementation of RDA on March 31, 2013. University of Houston Libraries decided to take action to ensure a simultaneous implementation of the new resource description standard. Besides incorporating new RDA records into our system, UH Libraries planned to achieve a major goal of retrospectively converting it's existing AACR bibliographic records into RDA records.

UH Libraries and three other UH Campus Libraries share the same ILS system. They established a RDA Implementation Task Force with representatives from each of the campus libraries. This presentation will cover their RDA implementation process in systems configuration, vendor collaboration, local policy creation, training, and communication. The presentation will also share the short-term and long-term benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from their RDA implementation.

The future of library metadata is at a crucial juncture: with the adoption of RDA, a Semantic Web-friendly encoding scheme is needed. Linked Data has the potential to be that replacement, at the same time increasing the global interoperability of bibliographic and related data in the era of RDA. But what is linked data and why should librarians care? This presentation will explore these topics and more.

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RDA is a major change in how we think and catalog, particularly since our "legacy" systems will have to accept both AACR2 and RDA records. How has a system accepted both "pure" AACR2 and RDA records as well as "blended" recorded that incorporate parts of AACR2 and RDA into them, and how do users perceive these records, particularly the lack of a GMD?

"Coming in for a Landing: RDA at OCLC" is designed to give you general OCLC RDA facts, figures, and policies for those who are cataloging on OCLC or are using OCLC records in their local system. In addition, you will hear how the Contract Cataloging staff at OCLC prepared for, and converted their workflows to switch to RDA.

When it comes to implementing RDA, public libraries face some different challenges than those confronted by academic institutions and special libraries. Now that the national libraries’ implementation date has come and gone, how are public libraries dealing with the new cataloging code? This session will explore the ways in which RDA has affected public libraries’ cataloging practices and the issues these libraries have encountered along the way. It will also provide public librarians who have not yet implemented RDA with suggestions of things to keep in mind during implementation.

BIBFRAME is the Library of Congress's latest effort to develop a replacement for MARC. But why does MARC need to be replaced? What exactly is BIBFRAME? How does it, or doesn't it, align with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records? How does it fit with RDA? What kinds of things become possible with BIBFRAME and RDA together, which aren't possible in the MARC/AACR2 environment? What might the future of bibliographic control hold? This session attempts to provide answers to these and other questions surrounding BIBFRAME.