A Welcome to Trina Soderquist and Welcome Back to Chris Oliver

At last night's Synchronous Meeting of the RSC, we were delighted to welcome Trina Soderquist (pictured) to her first RSC Meeting. A respected member of the cataloguing community, Trina brings a wealth of policy experience from her role at the Library of Congress, where she has worked with policy specialists and librarians at LC and in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) on reviewing and developing the LC-PCC policy statements and Metadata Guidance Documents (MGDs) that will guide cataloguers in those communities as they apply the options in the official RDA Toolkit. 

Trina also brings practical experience cataloguing children's and young adult materials, having worked for the Children’s and Young Adults’ Cataloging Program (CYAC) at the LC, and has previously worked for over a decade in academic libraries. She succeeded Robert Maxwell as RSC Representative for North America on 1 January, and RSC Chair Renate Behrens expressed her gratitude for the speed with which Trina submitted responses to the eight Extent Proposals and Discussion Paper on soft-deprecated terms. 

You can find out more about Trina on her RSC webpage. 

We were also delighted to welcome Chris Oliver back to the RSC as the new Chair of the RDA Board, an ex officio position on the RSC in order to keep us up-to-date with Board decisions and, in terms of governance, to ensure that we are proceeding day-to-day in compliance with the Board's strategic aims. Chris talked us through the final draft of the Strategic Plan 2026-2028, as agreed at the Board meeting in December 2025, and she will ensure that it is published on the Board's webpages as soon as possible. 

Director of ALA Digital Reference James Hennelly said this is the first time he can remember one of the copyright holder representatives agreeing to a second term as Board Chair, and praised Chris's long-standing commitment to RDA. As well as Board Chair, Chris has also served as a member of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project, which ran from 2016-2020, resulting in Official RDA. As such, she is an ideal person to Chair the Board and work with RSC Chair Renate Behrens, Chair Elect Robert Maxwell and the Director of ALA Digital Reference to lead us through the transition from Original RDA to Official RDA. 

Chris reassured the RSC that she will be monitoring the approach to the start of the Countdown Clock in May 2026 and the progress of the wider community through the agreed year of the Countdown, which is due to conclude in May 2027. She will be at the Public Session this evening, and we are sure that observers will want to offer her as warm a welcome back as the RSC did last night. 

Note: If you would like to attend tonight's Public Session, there is still time - email RSC Secretary Anne Welsh - RSCsecretary@rdatoolkit.org and she will send you the information for observers (which includes the Zoom link). She will be taking an hour's break from the computer screen 5:55pm - 6:55pm before the Public Session at 7:00-9:pm UTC (There is a handy time converter here).