Having signed on for the free access period for the RDA Toolkit, I made one of my goals for AALL in Denver to find out as much as possible about RDA so once back home I could begin to use it. THANKS to all of you who both provided information and provided the forums for sharing this information. I have a better understanding, but as Ellen expressed in her recent post, there are still many things to be figured out. Now back home, I am reflecting on what I saw and heard. My reflections at this point:
--I was encouraged about the degree of openness (along with anxiety, etc.) to RDA which I observed
--I hope that this rollout of RDA will be a transition period leading to more dynamic way of showcasing our resources
--I agree with Hillman and Coyle (The Semantic Web and RDA) that we need a networked environment bringing together information from different sources allowing people to interact with and use the information
--I hope that the younger generation of technical services librarians will have the vision to get us to that point
-- Right now I am thinking about more mundane things like will we need to do reindexing of our ILS in order to download and display the new fields? How will the RDA records display in the catalog? Will it be a steep learning curve? How about the load tables for our shelf ready books?
I think it will be a fun and challenging summer.
"Fun and challenging" all right . . .
ReplyDeleteI think the hurdles we may have with implementing RDA is not RDA itself, but how to make data/information more granular for sharing with other schema other than MARC, while still using MARC as a basis for our ILSs and backends of our discovery tools. (Ex.: The new 3XX fields) We are definitely in transition and probably will be for a long time.
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