Thursday, April 14, 2011

RDA and the eXtensible Catalog

Dave Lindahl and Jennifer Bowen, XCO Co-Executive Directors, wrote a brief statement that describes the benefits of implementing RDA for new metadata and discovery applications such as XC.

http://hdl.handle.net/1802/14588

In early March, Dave Lindahl and Jennifer Bowen met with the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee at the Library of Congress to discuss XC's partial implementation of RDA. The committee invited Dave and Jennifer to submit a written statement for inclusion as an Appendix to the group's final report, due out within the next month, which will include recommendations regarding whether and how the US national libraries (LC, NLM, NAL) will implement RDA.

From the statement:

"XC software represents the first live implementation of a subset of RDA in a FRBR‐based, non‐MARC environment. XC’s implementation of RDA has been led by individuals who have participated in the development of both the RDA Toolkit and the RDA vocabulary registry. XC’s use of RDA has also been informed by the real‐world requirements of actual working software, as well as through a user research process conducted at four ARL libraries."

and

"A community‐wide implementation of RDA within the library world will benefit not only users of the eXtensible Catalog, but also developers and users of other applications that make information about library collections accessible via the open web."