During the month of May work began on transferring RDA Toolkit and related websites to a new server and under the support and maintenance of a new developer. The sites included in this move are access.rdatoolkit.org and orginal.rdatoolkit.org, as well as rdatoolkit.org and rda-rsc.org. All the content currently on these sites will be transferred to the new server. This work will be completed by late October.
If you'd like to explore what RDA's expansion as an international standard means for you and your institution, be sure to watch and attend our most recent webinars:
NARDAC Update Forum (FREE)
Monday, August 30, 2021 at 1:30 to 3:30 PM CDT
Recordings our new available for our two free webinars held July 16th and August 4th respectively. Led by ALA Digital Reference Director James Hennelly, the first free webinar was a one-hour RDA Toolkit Demo covering RDA Toolkit releases and updates introduced since the last demo was presented in January.
This American summer at ALA Digital Reference, access to education is our priority. Forums, webinars, and blog interviews with RDA educators are all scheduled into our autumn.
This year's ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition offers both live and on demand educational programming. While the sessions schedule (in progress) can be viewed here, we'd like to highlight several programs that we think might be especially interesting to the RDA community:
The April 2021 release of RDA Toolkit was published on April 6th. It includes the addition of more policy statements from the Library of Congress - Program for Cooperative Cataloging and the British Library and introduces a small number of Best Practices for the Music Library Association. There are also fixes and minor improvements to existing Toolkit functionality, including the introduction of blue highlight in the yellow Condition boxes to improve visibility.
Now available for purchase on the ALA Store website, Introduction to RDA: A Guide to the Basics after 3R, Second Edition is Christine Oliver’s primer guide to the RDA cataloging standard for library and information science students, records managers, catalogers, and other library professionals. The new print book specifically covers the changes to RDA reflected in the official RDA Toolkit launched on December 15th.
On January 26th a free live demo was held to introduce the public to the redesigned RDA Toolkit. Now that the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign Project (3R) is complete, it is a good time to get acquainted with all the features and functions of the new Toolkit. The hour-long webinar, New RDA Toolkit Demo, covered navigating and searching the improved RDA Toolkit, new features and functions of the site, and some tips for getting the most out of it.
RDA: Resource Description and Access users experienced the long-awaited elevation of the beta RDA Toolkit to official status on Tuesday, December 15, 2020. The new Toolkit had been undergoing restructure and redesign through the “3R Project” aimed at bringing the RDA standard into alignment with the IFLA (The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Library Reference Model and the RDA Toolkit into compliance with current accessibility standards.
A new release of the beta RDA Toolkit was published on December 15th. The release marks the end of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign Project, commonly known as the 3R Project. With this release the beta Toolkit site that debuted in 2018 becomes the official RDA Toolkit, available at access.rdatoolkit.org. The original RDA Toolkit will remain available to all subscribers at original.rdatoolkit.org. The original site can also be accessed from the new Toolkit through the Resources tab and from the top banner menu bar.
