CIG Conference: report to follow

This week, I spent three very enjoyable days on the Exeter University campus at the Cataloguing & Indexing Group (CIG) conference. It was an extremely interesting and useful programme with lots of great conversations and discussions. I have lots of notes to write up and things to mull over so I intend to do that in a series of blog posts.

However, I’m off on holiday for a week and so won’t have a chance to do it for a while. In the meantime, I wanted to point anyone with an interest to the conference website (presentations should appear there soon). I couldn’t livetweet in the conference room itself (no wifi signal) but there were several of us tweeting from the conference, or adding our tweets since we got back so have a look at the hashtag #cigx for more information. I’ve tried to set up a twapperkeeper archive for that hashtag, but am not sure if it’s working yet.

The high points (apart from meeting lots of lovely people and the fantastic food) were a morning spent looking at how Japanese business methods (LEAN Kaizen, Six Sigma) can be applied to technical services workflows – or actually any workflows for those of you in libraries too small to have separate departments – with examples from the experiences of University of Warwick, University of Aberdeen and the British Library. Also a programme designed to look at the “wisdom of the crowd” in assigning LCSH. There were also discussions of RDA which I’m going to come back to in a separate post, as well as retrospective cataloguing projects. There was actually such a lot of useful content that I will definitely need several posts to cover it all. So, there’s some cataloguing goodness coming to this blog very shortly. Once I’ve had my holiday.

Recommended Daily Allowance: RDA

Please forgive the post title, there are not many puns to be had in cataloguing acronyms. This is a non-23 Things post, and so should possibly come with a health warning for anyone reading who is not a cataloguer!

This weekend I attended the seminar on RDA in Europe: making it happen! (note the chirpy exclamation mark, which pretty much sums up the atmosphere of the whole event). The seminar was organised by JSC, the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA and EURIG, the European RDA Interest Group, a body that does not yet officially exist but which elicits a huge amount of interest in Europe and beyond, as evidenced by attendance at Sunday’s event. I’ve been thinking a lot about RDA since the launch of RDA Toolkit and it was a good opportunity to spend some time with other people who are also thinking about it.

Most of the people speaking and attending were moving on the IFLA 2010 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Yes, that’s a note of envy you can detect. For this reason, it might take a while for the slides of the various presentations to appear online (though this has been promised) and so I’m going to wait to write up a proper summary of the event until I can link to slides.

I did want to say that it was a very interesting overview of general interest in and attitudes towards RDA in many different countries in Europe. There was also an extremely useful, detailed summary of the US national libraries’ testing of RDA which begins in October 2010 as well as another chance to look at RDA Toolkit, which has inspired me to go back in with my open-access subscription and play about with it some more.

There is a growing body of training material, example records and other RDA-related documentation online so I’ll link to some of it in lieu of any further summary from me. I’m finding this very helpful in understanding exactly what RDA may mean for our cataloguing practices and workflows.

• Bibliographic record examples (in terms of RDA elements and encoded in MARC21) from JSC
• Many different example MARC21 records with comparisons between AACR2 and RDA from LC, including special sets on 260 publication information, statement of responsibility and the replacement of GMD. 
• Library of Congress has made available their RDA Train-the-Trainer webcasts
• Library of Congress training materials for RDA Test participants
• The text of the Library of Congress Policy Statements (LCPS) which are revisions and replacements for the Library of Congress Rule Interpretations (LCRIs) which we all know and love. Beacher Wiggins of LC stated that they have reduced the number from nearly 500 LCRIs to under 200 LCPS(s?) which is hopefully a very good sign. The LCPSeseses are also available via Cataloger’s Desktop for those with a subscription and will soon be made available on the RDA Toolkit (again for those with a subscription). We were shown a demo of this new feature and it does look extremely useful given that the text of RDA, AACR2 and the LCPS will all be linked to each other wherever relevant.