I am asked this question by our partner libraries every so often these days. For those of you who aren’t keeping track of what’s new in cataloging, Resource Description and Access (RDA) is intended to be the successor to the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, which govern how librarians have described things for their catalogs. RDA is meant to update the description guidelines to include all kinds of content and media and bring AACR into a digital age.
We are definitely keeping an eye on RDA, but so far there has been nothing that is, as we say, machine-actionable, so being ready has mostly involved monitoring the progress of the Joint Steering Committee.
At the moment, the timeline for RDA’s emergence as an accepted standard seems somewhat in doubt, given the Library of Congress’s recent call to suspend all work on RDA until the business requirements for proceeding can be articulated and large-scale testing of FRBR can be carried out with real data.
Diane Hillmann (from Cornell University) met with AVIAC (Automation Vendors Information Advisory Committee) at ALA in June to talk with vendors about what RDA might involve for us. We had an interesting discussion about the ways in which vendors have used the MARC format to transmit information beyond bibliographic description embedding invoice and order information, item record and holdings information, and other local uses that leverage 9xx fields and other parts of the MARC record. Diane assured us that RDA would have extensible sections for vendor use, and I am now working with Diane and some other vendors to try to capture some of the ways in which we have used MARC that might need to make it into RDA.
Diane also indicated that a preliminary data sample might be ready as early as August 2008 (that’s this month!) so I am looking forward to seeing what there is to see.
For more information about RDA:
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