Hi Kate,
While I can't tell you what individual schools are doing about RDA, I can tell you that it is here and here to stay... at least for the time being.

I believe that Follett and other vendors are looking into how to make the transition as easy as possible for the building level librarians. Having said that, yes, there might be a change in how you think about your materials but the hope is that the change is for the better. A big problem with RDA is that professional catalogers are still wrestling with this new framework themselves so they are not very good at explaining it to the "as needed" catalogers. Part of the problem is that the current conveyor of the data (MARC) doesn't really play well with RDA. This means that while they are still trying to figure out how RDA is impacting the data they are creating, they are also working on a new means of organizing that data. When the dust settles, this will probably be one of the biggest paradigm shifts in cataloging since the introduction of MARC. Schools can't ignore it but they might not feel a big impact just yet.

Theoretically, the purpose of RDA is (as you mentioned) to create links to different versions of the same work. Think the paperback edition of The Cat in the Hat, the hardback edition, and the movie with Mike Myers. Sounds like a great idea, right? I mean we've kind of been tossing that problem back and forth for a long time. So yay for us! Unfortunately theory is sometimes hard to put into practice.

Without getting into my presentations about RDA, I will try to put into a nutshell (like sunflower seed size) what I think school librarians need to be aware of right now:
Follett and others have already made changes to the MARC record. Most obvious is the inclusion of what one might call material type fields. The fields are numbers 336, 337, and 338. When we can finally link all of our Cat in the Hat materials, these will be very cool fields to have because we will know right away that the library has two books and one movie of The Cat in the Hat. You can see the fields and the codes used in these fields if you go to the Library of Congress MARC Bibliographic page: http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd3xx.html

The other thing you may notice is information about authors and illustrators that was only sometimes included in the catalog record. This added information has always been there but we have never paid much attention to it. If you look at the MARC record you might see something like 100 1 _ $aSmith, Tom.$eauthor. It is the $e that we are paying more attention to. The reason for this has to do with linking like materials. Let's go back to The Cat in the Hat. We all agree that Dr. Seuss is the author of the paperback and hard back copies. BUT what about the movie? Wouldn't you say that the screen play writers are the real "authors" of the movie. I am very sure that Dr. Seuss would completely disavow his relationship to it! So that $e is important in that it will help us to understand the roles of the various creators of the content of the work that is in our hands; especially when we FINALLY get rid of the 100 field and everything about the creators ends up in the 7XX part of the record (I keep hoping that will happen but I am no longer holding my breath). The Library of Congress does provide some help in how to fill out that $e but right now it is a little bit of a moving target.

I know it doesn't help much to know that even the experts are still messing around with the concepts in RDA but at least you know that if you are confused, you are in good company. For the "as needed" cataloger, I think you need to know that you will be seeing new fields but that the vendors are trying to make it easy to fill in those fields. Just make sure you do fill them in!
For the person who does all of the cataloging, there is a bigger mountain to climb. We can't ignore this as we did MARC (remember MicroLif?) because the systems are changing too fast. Don't panic, but don't ignore it either.

If you have other questions, I'm happy to field them as best as I can.
Hope this helps!
Allison

On 2/17/14 2:17 PM, Kate Brown wrote:

Greetings –

Thoughts and questions about RDA …

I first ran into RDA during a course I took two summers ago. It was a quick intro and basically what I took away w/ me was a v-e-r-y broad overview of what it could potentially mean to implementing it in a school library (my read was it’s going to mean LOTS of up-front and behind-the-scenes changes plus a lots of user re-education about catalogs and how to get the most out of them). However, I didn’t get enough of an understanding of the general concept, i.e., the “why we’re about to do all of this” part, or the why’s of the new system’s layers, that I could even explain to someone.

Basically, I see a course in RDA in my future … and very soon!

We use Destiny, and when I looked at the Follett website, I saw that they already have links to RDA integration, how-to’s, and where-for’s on the help pages and at the Follett page. Maybe if I had a better understanding of the why of the whole thing, the parts would make better sense – at least that’s what I’m hoping.

I (strongly) sense that RDA will require major modifications in our thinking about and ways we do cataloging as well as the connections our users have w/ catalogs. Already, records you’ve imported may have RDA elements in them; you need to find out if there are and what they’re going to look like on the screen that users see. Certainly, searching catalogs is going to be substantially different in that patrons can be much more precise – if they want to – about which performance, which printing, which, when, who, etc.

And the layers … of! Wait till you see the associations between the elements! I hope you have better luck than I did in trying to make connections; some people in my class (sort of) got it but the rest of us … suffice it to say we all rejoiced that there wasn’t a graded assignment connected to this introduction!

So, before I’m years behind and while I can still work this into my plans for this summer and next fall, here is what’s on my mind:

·     Where are you so far with RDA?

·     Have you done any PD training? School paid for or not? Where and from whom?

·     Have you checking into what your ILS is offering for PD?

·     Has your school or district even heard of RDA? If so, are they saying “sure, sure, whatever” or are they taking this seriously, as in making plans for training you, you training the staff and students, you doing catalog overhauls, the system getting behind this … ?

We’re at the ‘oh, that’s interesting … let me know if you hear anything else about that’ stage. However, announcements from different professional conferences this spring and summer are replete with RDA workshops, discussions, training sessions, etc. So there’s another question: How do we get our admins to take this seriously, esp. when few even know there’s anything more than the screen of a catalog?

Thanks for listening … I’m anxious to read your feedback.

Kate Brown, Librarian

Mattapoisett, MA

imkateb@gmail.com

kbrown@brevisconsult.com

-- 
Allison G. Kaplan, Ed.D.
Faculty Associate
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Wisconsin
4263 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 890-1335
Email: agkaplan at wisc dot edu