It was a busy day at the ALA Conference for RDA and RDA Toolkit. The U.S. Test Committee met with vendors, testers, and the public, and summarized the results of the test and the reasoning behind their recent decision. The committee stated that the "rewrite" of RDA will actually be more of a rewording, intended to simplify and clarify some of the instructions. Cataloging practice will not be affected by the rewording. We also learned that the Library of Congress will begin partial RDA cataloging in November.

The two-day preconference on RDA concludes today. The first day featured four presentations covering key areas of difference between RDA and AACR2 and best practices for RDA Toolkit. One point of emphasis was the key role of workflows in maximizing the potential of RDA Toolkit. In the near future we plan to share the best practices and fresh ideas for workflows on the blog. Today's session covers cataloging electronic resources, visual materials, and nonmusical audio recordings with RDA, as well as a presentation on RDA's impact on library automation systems.

As we review the Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee on the implementation of RDA and plan the next steps for RDA Toolkit, it is clear that there is one thing we can do right away to help users become as well prepared as possible for RDA implementation. And that is to extend our double-user offer.

Last week, we introduced our MARC linking service, which described how to build links from a location in MARC (e.g. 245 00 $b) to relevant instructions in RDA. We think this service will prove very useful to vendors and users, however, there may also be times when users want to simply link to an RDA instruction without any tie to MARC mapping.

This is the debut of our vendor interviews. After reviewing results of our user survey, we selected the most requested vendors and sent them a series of questions derived from those our users asked. We hope to publish the intereviews on a regular basis. And we hope that they will prove useful to RDA Toolkit's users, giving them some idea of what to expect from technical service products during the period of transition from AACR2 to RDA.

First up is Innovative Interfaces, Inc., who are best known for their Millennium ILS. The questions were answered by Ken Wells, product manager for III.