Report of the ALA Rep to the JSC

The following is the report that I submitted to ALCTS, CCS, etc., on my activities as ALA Representative to the JSC between June 2008 and January 2009:

Content development for RDA: Resource Description and Access is winding down, and the product development is gearing up.  In addition, now that we have a complete text for RDA, implementation planning can begin.

Since my last report in June, 2009:

In August, RDA was presented at a very successful IFLA satellite conference at the IFLA Annual Conference in Québec City.  Both the code and the RDA online product generated considerable interest.

The Joint Steering Committee worked through a number of remaining issues, completing consideration of all of the priority issues from previous constituency reviews, and forwarded the content for the full draft of RDA to the developers near the beginning of September, 2008.  The full draft was finally released on November 17 for a brief constituency review.  It was not possible to issue the draft in a pre-release version of the online software, as we had hoped, and the process for producing the text for the PDF files released for the review was far from smooth. However, the draft is now out and is being reviewed.

The JSC will be meeting from March 12-20 in Chicago at ALA Headquarters. At that meeting, we will make decisions on any outstanding issues, specifically those raised in the responses to the full draft. We plan to turn over as final text to the developers early in June 2009. At the March meeting, we will also begin to consider how to maintain RDA, including how to deal with a long list of issues that we had decided we could not include in the first release of RDA.  We expect that there will be substantial updates to RDA in the coming years.

Product development:  A prototype of the RDA software was demonstrated at the ALA Midwinter meeting.  The Co-Publishers expect that RDA will be released during the third quarter of 2009.  They have begun to release some preliminary information about pricing and licensing, which includes both one-time and subscription prices.

RDA testing:  The Library of Congress, National Agriculture Library, and National Library of Medicine will be testing RDA once it is released.  They are looking for about 20 institutions or individuals to join them in the test.  Preparation for the test (training of participants and practice work) will take about three months; the test will take another three months; after that, the results will be evaluated and announced.

 

John Attig

ALA Representative