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Keeping Current: Resource Description and Access (RDA) Cataloging

by Adrith Bedore Bicchieri, Head Editor, INALJ Nevada

Keeping Current: Resource Description and Access (RDA) Cataloging

inaljJan2013If you’ve been out of library school awhile, you may or may not be thinking about how far out of date the concepts and coursework you worked so hard on have become in the intervening months.

Many things may not have changed very much, but in some quarters, things are about to change a great deal. Cataloging, for example. The Library of Congress is about to switch from producing original cataloging in AACR2 format to producing original cataloging in RDA (Resource Description and Access) format. Other national libraries, such as the National Library of Medicine in the US and the British, Canadian, and Australian national libraries, are also expecting to implement original RDA cataloging in the first quarter of 2013.

If you are interested in cataloging as a possible direction for your library career, you may be interested in learning about this new cataloging method.

 

 

The Library of Congress Catalogers’ Learning Workshop has made their RDA training materials available online, complete with training plan. http://www.loc.gov/catworkshop/RDA%20training%20materials/LC%20RDA%20Training/LC%20RDA%20course%20table.html

 

 

ALA and ALCTS (Association for Library Collections and Technical Services) have created a number of webinars on RDA, and have made them available for free on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1AAFB573158DC4A1&feature=plcp

 

 

North Carolina State University, a participant library in the US testing of RDA which continues to produce original cataloging in RDA, has made their RDA resources available online at https://staff.lib.ncsu.edu/confluence/display/MNC/RDA#RDA-NCSURDATrainingDocumentation with the proviso that some documents may be behind a campus intranet, requiring a password, etc.

 

 

If you’ve encountered other great RDA resources, please share them in the comments on LinkedIn here:  http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=4112382&type=member&item=215691320

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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