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
