For those of you wondering about RDA and SCIS…

book_store_on_Thames

As you may be aware, initial testing of RDA is to be undertaken by the U.S. National Libraries (The Library of Congress (LC); the National Library of Medicine (NLM); and the National Agricultural Library (NAL)).  The testing period was due to begin in July this year after the release of the online version of RDA and was projected to take approximately nine months.  However, there been have unforeseen delays in releasing RDA and so testing has not yet commenced.

At this stage SCIS (along with other national agencies) is still awaiting the outcome of the U.S. testing. We’re also closely monitoring the implementation plans of the national libraries including the National Library of Australia. Naturally before committing to a course of action regarding RDA, SCIS will need to consider the impact of any such changes on our users very carefully, and will also need to confer with library system vendors to ensure that any changes will be supported by school systems.  If you’re worried about RDA affecting the library records you download from SCIS, please don’t be – we won’t be making any changes until we are certain that our users will be able to support the new standard!

Those of you interested in undertaking a bit more research on RDA’s development and implementation might find the following sites interesting:

http://www.rda-jsc.org/rda.html – Created by the  joint steering committee for the development of RDA, this page contains background information and FAQs about the and projected implementation of RDA.

http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/rda.html – The National Library of Australia’s RDA information page contains information about the projected implementation of RDA by the National Library, as well as links to some interesting presentations on RDA and the conceptual models on which it has been based.

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/ – The Library of Congress’s RDA testing page gives information about progression and methodologies of the testing being undertaken by the U.S. National libraries.

The gorgeous image I used for this post is of a book fair on the Thames, and is by Jasoon, whose images on Flickr Creative Commons  can be viewed at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoon/
/ CC BY 2.0

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SCIS (Schools Catalogue Information Service) was created with the aim of providing schools with access to a database of consistent catalogue records created according to agreed national standards, in order to reduce the cost and duplication of effort of cataloguing resources in schools. Since its inception, SCIS has been responsible for improving the quality and consistency of cataloguing materials for schools.

One thought on “For those of you wondering about RDA and SCIS…”

  1. The National Agriculture Library recently posted an email to the MARC 21 discussion list. This confirmed that the actual testing will begin after RDA becomes available which at the time of writing is projected for late 2009. The test will consist of three phases, each lasting approximately three months: the training phase, the record creation phase, and the data collection and analysis phase. A decision is anticipated in the fall (i.e. 3rd quarter) of 2010.

    At this stage the National Libraries have made no decision about implementing RDA and no decision will be made until the testing is completed and the results have been analyzed.

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