ALA's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas has included plenty of news for RDA Toolkit users. Today's RDA Update Forum was a particular stampede of useful information. Most significantly, Beacher Wiggins, Director for Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access at the Library of Congress and a member of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee, reported that significant progress has been been made on all the tasks put forth in the committee's June 2011 report. Assuming continued progress, Wiggins was optimistic that implementation of RDA by the U.S. national libraries could occur in the first quarter of 2013.

In regard to the rewording of RDA, Wiggins stated that the Test Committee would begin reviewing reworded chapters in February, and that the committee would evaluate each chapter by a set of established criteria and give each a thumbs up or down. He also announced that test participants Christopher Cronin of the University of Chicago and Richard Hasenyager of North East Independent School District of San Antonio, Texas will be joining the Test Committee in their evaluation of the reworded chapters. Expect further news about implementation in June after the first five reworded chapters have been reviewed.

The meeting also included reports from John Attig, ALA representative to the JSC, who reported on the JSC review process and progress of the rewording project; Linda Barnhart, chair of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, restated the PCC's endorsement of the Task Group on AACR2 & RDA Acceptable Heading Categories and defined the PCC's Day One for RDA Authority Records plan; and Glen Patton of OCLC discussed future development plans including the addition of RDA workforms to Connexion in the Spring.