The ALA Annual Conference is underway, and this morning the RDA Update Forum contained plenty of good information for RDA catalogers. The panel included representatives of Machine Readable Bibliographic Information committee (MARBI), the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC), OCLC, the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee, and ALA Publishing. A brief summary of the proceedings follows. Slides and handouts of the presentations will be made available on ALA Connect.

Sally McCallum spoke on behalf of MARBI, and reviewed the last few years of major changes to MARC to accomodate RDA cataloging. New fields and subfields have been added to both bibliographic and authority records, most notably the 264 and 33X to the former, and 10 new fields added to the name authorities. Ms. McCallum reported that the RDA-motivated changes to MARC have slowed and that now "the focus needs to be on learning and using RDA."

John Attig reported on JSC activities. Progress on the rewording of RDA continues with the JSC currently reviewing chapter 2 revisions. Progress is also being made on building the controlled vocabularies for RDA with a target to complete them in July and have them published on RDA Toolkit in the Fall of this year. Corrections to RDA and review of proposed changes continue. The JSC will convene in Chicago this November to consider proposals from constituent libraries as well those from the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) and the ISBD review group.

Glenn Patton of OCLC spoke about recent updates to Connexion, including the MARC updates 13 and 14 and the addition of RDA workforms, both bibliographic and authority. He also updated attendees on the progress of OCLC's revised policy statement for RDA, noting the thoughtful feedback they have received for the community. He also discussed OCLC's collabortation with Schema.org and the potential benefits of exposing more library data to the broader Web and of further introducing linked data practices into cataloging work.

Linda Barnhart discussed how very busy the PCC has been in recent months. They have targeted March 31, 2013 as Day One for full implementation of RDA authority records and access points coded as PCC. The extensive work that the PCC has done in preparing training materials for RDA implementation can be evidenced on their new website at loc.gov/aba/pcc and through the materials available at the Cataloger's Learning Workshop. Ms. Barnhart also announced that the PPC would be releasing a list of PCC-approved RDA training materials in the coming months.

Beacher Wiggins, speaking on behalf of the U.S. RDA test Coordinating Committee noted the progress that has been made in addressing the recommendations of the committee. They have completed their review of reworded chapters 9, 10 and 11 and are currently reviewing the enormous chapter 6. The committee has been pleased with reworded text, and all three national libraries have targeted the first quarter of 2013 for RDA implementation.

Troy Linker of ALA Publishing spoke about recent enhancements to RDA, which of course can be reviewed on our Development blog and discussed some of the upcoming development plans as well. Mr. Linker also explained the plan for the release of the print update. Because the April JSC Update and JSC FastTrack changes for the past year effected over 90 percent of the Print RDA pages, it was determined that it made more sense to release a new accumulation. Release of the new Print RDA will be in December of 2012 so that it can include both the Update/FastTrack changes and the as much of the reworded chapters as are available. The next print update will be in mid-2013, and include the April 2013 JSC Update and the remaining reworded chapters.