During the 3R Project, several RDA elements were identified as being redundant with other elements or were considered to be too granular in scope. These elements were "soft-deprecated". The RSC is curious to know about how institutions are addressing these elements of the RDA Toolkit. A survey regarding soft-deprecated terms is available to complete by 15 September 2023.
A new release was posted to RDA Toolkit last week. The release is highlighted by changes related to RSC/PlacesWG/2023/1, an accepted proposal from the RSC's Places Working Group. This proposal called for a change to the names of two elements and the rewording of a few options, all listed below. The release includes an enhancement to the Toolkit display that freezes the page title, navigation breadcrumbs, and the Policy Statements drop-down menu at the top of the page when scrolling.
The Oceania region RDA Committee (ORDAC) is pleased to present a series of three webinars exploring concepts from the Official RDA Guidance chapters, presented by ORDAC member and Oceania RSC representative Charlotte Christensen based at the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa.
The RDA Board in consultation with the Copyright Holders of RDA have determined that a hard date for the removal of the original RDA Toolkit website is needed. This determination was made against a backdrop of giving user communities plenty of time for planning in their transition to official RDA. The Board plans to begin a countdown clock in May 2026 (specific date still to be determined), with the removal of the original Toolkit taking place a year later—May 2027. This plan was presented to the RDA Steering Committee last week, and the RSC fully supported this decision.
CORE will present a four-part webinar series “The New and Official RDA Toolkit: A Practical Approach” this month. Originally presented as an in-person preconference for the 2022 Core Forum, this webinar is geared toward catalogers, metadata librarians, and anyone interested in Resource Description and Access (RDA). Core members and non-members are welcome to attend.
The “Submit Feedback” link in the official RDA Toolkit enables users to provide information about typos, errors, and broken links, as well as suggested changes to the text. Some of this feedback has resulted in updates to RDA. But for more significant changes to RDA, cataloging communities have another venue to suggest modifications: the RDA change proposal process.
ALA Digital Reference's webinar series continued Monday, August 1, 2022 at 11 AM CT/Chicago time with Damian Iseminger's virtual iteration of his #ALAAC22 program RDA Linked Data Forum. Damian presented on how RDA and RDA Toolkit are now optimized for linked data environments in the wake of the 3R Project and answered related questions from the audience live. The webinar recording is now available.
RDA educational programs sponsored by the American Library Association will be presented at ALA Annual in Washington, DC June 24th through June 27th.
A new release of RDA Toolkit was posted on June 22, 2022. It included updates to both the English and Finnish versions of RDA. The changes made to the English text of RDA for this release were almost entirely editorial (correcting typos and other minor corrections). Policy statements from the Library of Congress - Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the British Library and Music Library Association Best Practices were also updated. The Finnish translation of RDA was updated to make it current with the March 2022 release of English RDA.
