 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event, webinar, webcast, whatever you want to call us. We're online every week. We cover anything that may of interest to librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch both our live shows and recordings. The live show is done every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And then the recordings are posted onto our websites. You can watch them if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings. That's fine. Excuse me. You can always go to our website and watch them there. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini-train sessions. As I said, anything library related, we are happy to have it on the show. We bring in guest speakers sometimes, and sometimes we have on Nebraska Library Commission staff. And as we have this morning, to my left is Emily Nimsacan, who is the cataloging librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Hello. And she's been on quite a few times before doing various cataloging-related sessions, mainly for catalogers, to keep them up to speed on things. But I never worked as a cataloger myself, but I know even when you're working in a library as a cataloger, you do need to have some sort of knowledge of what's going on so you know what's happening behind the scenes. Or maybe you're just curious about what's happening behind the scenes. So Emily's got this session for us today. A resource description and what? RDA for non-catalogers. If you've heard this acronym and you're not a cataloger and you don't even have a clue or you know what it means, but you're not really sure what it's going to mean to me. This would be the session for you. No, I'll just hand it over to Emily and you can use the mouse for the keyboard. Either one should work. Great. All right. Thanks, Kristen. Thank you to all of you for attending. As Kristen said, this is RDA for non-catalogers. So if you literally are thinking resource description and what when you hear it, this is for you. If you've heard of it, but you're maybe not totally clear on how it's going to affect library catalogs, the session is for you too. I chose this graphic for the slide because I am presenting just the tip of the iceberg here. We're not going to go too deep. You don't have to worry about drowning. I'm not going to throw a bunch of mark tags at you. This is definitely for people who do not catalog on a daily basis and just kind of want to get the big picture about what the heck we're talking about when we talk about RDA. There we go. So speaking of, we will start by what the heck is RDA. Maybe you've heard this acronym, catalogers mumbling about it mysteriously. To answer that in the most simple form, RDA stands for resource description and access. It is a cataloging code, a set of cataloging rules or guidelines designed to replace the Anglo-American cataloging rules second edition, or ACR2 for short, which have been in effect since 1978-ish. People are our time. Yes. They were written in 1978 and implemented about 1980. RDA, the new rules were implemented by the national libraries on March 31, 2013. When I say national libraries, I mean the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural Library. A lot of libraries around the country followed suit when that happened. Even if you aren't necessarily a library that's creating original RDA records, if the Library of Congress is doing it and you import records from the Library of Congress and cataloging, you have RDA stuff in your catalog. So it's important to be aware. A few more things to know about RDA and kind of the purposes behind it. It is designed with the user in mind. As we'll see, it's based on a conceptual model that is based on user tasks, what our library users actually want to do with our catalogs. It's designed to describe all types of resources. ACR2 was very, very book-centric. And as we all know, we have a lot of stuff. That isn't books in our catalogs now. So RDA is designed to work better for describing things in our books. And it's also designed to make library data work better with other data on the web. Libraries are not the only people providing bibliographic information these days. And there's a lot of things about how our data currently works that doesn't really play nicely with other information out there. So it still kind of remains to be seen exactly how well RDA accomplishes this. One of the goals is to make our data work better with other data out there. I said it was designed with the user in mind. And I'm going to kind of just dip our toes into the model that it's based on that is supposed to be based on user tasks. RDA is based on a conceptual model called FERBURB. That stands for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. And yes, I realize I'm getting a little bit acronym heavy here. That's what we do. No, exactly. Librarians and catalogers in particular, we love our acronyms. I have up there on the slide a comic that I actually have on my office door here at work. You may not believe there are cataloging comics out there, but Maya Gosling is a librarian who has done several... I've on her blog and she has a lot of really funny comics. And so when her library was going through RDA training, she posted some comics related to that. So the trainer is saying, hey, CR2 is being replaced by RDA, which is based on FERBURB. The FRAB model used with WEMI entities. She complimented for our green components. And then says, ah, sorry, I'm just making stuff up now. And that's what it feels like sometimes. So if you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the acronyms, don't worry, you're not alone. Even catalogers make fun of this stuff. But it is important that you know at least the basics of FERBURB. So you can understand why we're doing some of the RDA changes. I remember when FERBURB came on the scene. Yeah, and it's been around for a lot longer than RDA. I think 98 or 2000, somewhere around there. So FERBURB has been out there for a while. And FERBURB is not cataloging rules. It doesn't tell you what kind of information, but it's just kind of a conceptual big picture. This is why we're doing this. And these are the different parts on how they relate to each other. There are four different levels in FERBURB. In that last slide, one of the acronyms over on WEMI, W-E-M-I, that one is actually real. And those are sort of the ways of thinking about the items that we're cataloging from abstract to concrete. Work, expression, manifestation, and item. So work is kind of the idea of a book or a movie or whatever as it existed in the author's head, even before it was written down or made concrete in any way. So say, like, tell two cities when Charles Dickens thought about it, that was a work. Expression gets a little bit more concrete. It still doesn't refer to any particular physical instance of something you have in your catalog. But the example I usually see given for expressions is that different translations are different expressions. So when Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in English, that's an expression. And if it was translated into French, that's a different expression. It doesn't matter if the English version is published by Penguin or Random House. That's manifestation level. That's coming later. But different expressions are different ways of kind of representing that work. Then when we get to manifestation, the M in Wemi, that is talking about a particular physical edition of something. So the Penguin edition of Tale of Two Cities versus the HarperCollins edition. Every single copy of that is an example of a manifestation. And then when you get to item, that is the actual, the most physical, concrete way of representing a book you could have. One particular physical item is an item, something you can hold in your hand, something you can use as a doorstop. That is what we talk about when we talk about items. So these are all kind of ways of thinking about, for example, when we use the word book, what exactly are we talking about? You can say, oh, I've read that book when you are talking about Tale of Two Cities and you don't mean that you've read that exact one physical copy sitting in some of that. You mean you've read... The story. The story, the work, so to speak. Or you can mean that book over there needs to be reshelved and that's a physical item. So these are kind of four different levels of thinking about things in our catalog. And Ferber talks about these various levels and the relationships between them and the relationships that creators of these things have to them. Ferber is all about relationships. And here is a potentially scary-looking chart that talks about those relationships. The big square in the middle, the group one entities, those are the things I was just talking about, work, expression, manifestation, and item. And again, those arrows are relationships. So if you take nothing else away from those, remember that Ferber is about relationships because we'll come back to that later when we're talking more about RDA. The group two entities are things that create these works, expressions, manifestations, or items. So people, families, corporate bodies, those are group two. They create the stuff that we have in our library collections. And then group three is the subjects. Think of subject headings. Anything that something is about goes in group three. So those are the very, very basics of what the heck RDA is. So why are we doing this? This is a pretty big change. And why is it necessary? Well, my short answer to that question is always, it's not the 1970s anymore. Our clothes have changed in the 1970s, and our catalog rules have changed. Like I said, AACR two was written in 1978, published in 78, and kind of slowly implemented, I think official day one was 1980. So it's been a while. A lot of things are different. Our catalogs have changed. In the 1980s, we had card catalogs. And so if you wanted to go look up something, you would have to flip through the files. And if you wanted to look up something by subject, you'd go to a different drawer. And if you wanted to look up something by author, you'd go to a different drawer. And now we have online electronic computerized catalogs. And so things function totally differently. We have keyword searching. You don't necessarily have to know the exact author's name when you're starting with. You can kind of guess at it and do a keyword search. So the concept of main entry is not necessarily as important as it was. So one big reason for RDA is that we need to change things based on what our catalogs are like. A lot of AACR two was based on the card catalog environment. There was a lot of abbreviations in there because we had to save space because we were typing on these little tiny three by five catalog cards. So we just don't need to do that stuff anymore. Also the things we catalog have changed. A DVD, a streaming video online, these things did not exist in 1978. AACR two, I mentioned, that's book based. It does have provisions for other types of items, but each other type of item has its own chapter. There's a chapter for continuing resources. There's a chapter for electronic resources. Any time anything new came along that we hadn't been cataloging before, you needed to have a whole chapter, basically. And that's really labor-intensive. And that's what we need to do. We need to have a whole chapter basically, and that's really labor-intensive. Because they did have different things, a good album, like the final album in the libraries at that point. Yeah, we weren't, yeah, even back then we weren't doing all our books, but our rules still were very heavily based on books. And then you had to kind of read them at the wheel every time you got something new. You had to add a whole chapter onto it. So it's like they're continuing to change. So we want to kind of avoid that. There will be things out there in 30 years that we're cataloging as foreign to us as streaming video would be doing cataloger in 1978. So we want to allow for things to change without having to completely rewrite our rules. So for the most part, RDA, anything in there applies to basically anything you could catalog. There are a few exceptions. Some rules will say this is just for musical scores or this is just for maps, things that just clearly do not apply to everything. But for the most part, it's meant to be guidelines for cataloging that you could possibly think of. And as I said before, the information universe has changed. We are not the only players in the game when it comes to bibliographic information or reference information in general. People don't have to come to a reference desk and ask a basic factual question. They can use Google. Even to find out about books, they don't have to come to the library. There's Amazon out there. Publishers have their own information on books. They don't exist as far as a two-way street. Our information can be used to inform these sources and get reliable information out there. And possibly we could make use of data from publishers or Amazon and import them into our catalogs and go both ways. A lot of people use book covers from library thing. There are lots of other resources out there and we want to have a model that allows us to make use of those other sources and provide our information to those other sources. RDA is supposed to help us do that. Those are the basics. What is RDA? Why are we doing this? Let's get into the nuts and bolts of what is different now. If you're looking at a catalog record or a library catalog in general, what will you notice with RDA records that is different from AACR2 records? For one thing, there are fewer abbreviations. We don't have to constrain ourselves to catalog cards anymore. If you're used to AACR2 records, you may be used to seeing things like this with pages as abbreviated, p-period. Color and illustrations are both abbreviated. And with RDA those are spelled out. I will point out that centimeter is still what you might think of as abbreviated. If you really don't want to get into nerdy catalogues, please shut your ears now. But for those who may wonder it has been determined that the CM is not actually an abbreviation, it's a symbol. And this is not catalogues being nerdy, this is scientists being nerdy, apparently according to the international scientific community. This is across the board, CM is not an abbreviation, it's a symbol. We continue to use CM even though everything else is spelled out. And you'll also notice you don't necessarily automatically put a period at the end of it. That was always punctuation that came from AACR2 rather than the rules itself. So you don't necessarily have to, there are exceptions based on whether or not there's a series heading in the record and that's going way down deep below the Tivity iceberg so I'm going to stop right there. But just take away, there are fewer abbreviations in RDA. Here's another example. AACR2 with its considerations for catalog cards had a few abbreviations that were standardized regardless of what was actually on the item you're cataloging. With RDA the main guiding principle is to represent whatever actually appears on the item. So in an addition statement that goes in the 250 field in a mark record, that's what the 250 there means if it actually says third revised edition spelled out on the item under AACR2 you would make three abbreviations. You would put the numeral in for third, you would do REV period for revised and you would do ED period for addition. With RDA you just take what you see. So in a lot of ways RDA is really easier for a new cataloger that would say people who aren't changing over from AACR2, you don't really have to think about whether you're supposed to abbreviate something. You just do whatever is on the item. In that second example the addition statement has second with the numeral, so that's how you do it under RDA. It has an addition abbreviated so you abbreviate that under RDA but revised is spelled out so you spell that out under RDA where you would have abbreviated it under AACR2. So if you start seeing slightly longer looking records with fewer abbreviations that's why. Again this kind of goes back to RDA and Ferber's emphasis on user needs. It's probably easier for patrons to understand what they're talking about. They're trying to translate the abbreviations like ENL I'm not sure what I mean enlarged. Kind of take what you see and make it easier for patrons to read. Another difference you'll notice is that the rule of three is gone and if you're not a cataloger maybe you don't necessarily know what the rule of three means but you probably do realize its effects. If there are more than three authors under AACR2 you would only include the first author's name. Again we're saving space for catalog cards here. So you would only include the first author's name and then you would put the Latin abbreviation at all in brackets. I sometimes joke there with RDA I'm a little bit disappointed because I don't get to use the Latin that I took in college anymore but I think I'll learn to live with that. Again easier for patrons to understand. Under RDA if there are more than three authors you still go ahead and include them all. There are optional exceptions for if you have something with 18 authors and your catalogers just don't have time to include them all. You can substitute an abbreviation but we're not doing Latin again. You would say Susan Brown and four others in brackets. So again much more understandable for the patrons and so you can make exceptions if you just don't have time to include all the other author's names. In some of the training I've been doing on RDA I leaned heavily on training slides from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and other slides would say their local policy is to transcribe all names unless unduly onerous it just sounded so British but you make your local call as to what is too much work for your catalogers basically. As I would kind of refer to Latin terms are gone. This does not just apply to the rule of three but also for example in the publication information. Previously under AACR 2 if you did not know where something was published you would use the abbreviation S-period L-period CNA LOCO without a place showing off my Latin again and if you did not know the name of the publisher you would use S-period N-period CNA without name. With RDA you're supposed to use these big long phrases, place of publication not identified, publisher not identified again probably easier for users to understand what the heck it means. There have been some critiques that it takes up a lot more space with people using mobile devices maybe it's not as user friendly as it tries to be but I would hope that maybe if you were developing a mobile interface you could substitute something like an icon or something that would make it a little bit more or just don't have that information available on the very first results screen or something like that I think there are work around but that is one critique of RDA that the lack of abbreviations does make it a little bit unwieldy for smaller mobile devices. We have a question that relates to this and I think the previous slides too the information you said you take this information coming from whatever it says in the document. Do you want to come coming from where on the item? The cover? That's a good question. Generally under RDA it stays the same as AACR 2 under AACR 2 that they would say the chief source is usually the title page RDA gives you more flexibility as to kind of substitute sources if you don't have a title page for whatever reason they basically say you can use they're a little bit more flexible, first of all they call them preferred sources instead of chief source so it just sounds a little bit more flexible that we would prefer you to take it from the title page but if not, yeah there's a lot of work in RDA, a lot of cataloger's judgment so there is a whole list of order of preference title pages first but then things like cover or spine or running title those are all listed in order of preference in RDA so for a book it varies based on the type of object of course but for a book title page is still preferred but they give you some more flexibility you can even go to outside reference sources if for some reason it doesn't actually appear on the item itself but you have a website there from the publisher or whatever where it gives the title so that's a good question. Possibly one of the most noticeable differences about RDA is that the GMD is gone GMD stands for general material designation and if you don't know what the heck that means you probably would recognize it in a list of search results it's the bracket information in the title that conveys the type of the material so if you type in the title of Harry Potter and Sorcerer's Stone and you get back one that says electronic resource in brackets after it and one says sound recording and one says video recording that's the GMD and it's supposed to be kind of a signpost to let you know what type of item you're getting back so you know if you want the print version or a DVD or something like that this has been replaced by three different elements in RDA content type, media type, and carrier type and the intent behind this is to kind of be able to get a little bit more specific with the GMD having to choose just one word it's a little bit fuzzy sometimes some of them refer to the actual physical item some of them refer to kind of more of the content type video recording doesn't really tell you what physical type of object it is also there are some items where more than one thing could apply these three elements can be repeated where as with the GMD you just had to choose one for example a playaway, is it a sound recording or is it a computer resource and so yeah exactly and so I don't like there were probably there were working groups who had to make a decision that we were going to call them all sound recordings but really you know a lot of patrons would benefit from knowing their electronic resources too or a streaming video, is it a video recording or is it an online resource, well both so with these they can be repeated you know as there was some kind of, I've had some examples of terminology here, he's come from a list of terms listed in the RDA rules and they're not necessarily the everyday language that people would think of it, here's another RDA comic true catalogers, one asks them are you doing anything fun this weekend well I thought I'd go see a two-dimensional movie image a movie, I mean a movie, so you know when you get into these terms for the content media and carrier types you start to feel like you're speaking a totally different language that our users won't understand but let me tell you a little bit about what each of these things are the content type basically is kind of an abstract of what the heck this thing is without talking at all about the physical carrier, so a text print book and an e-book both have the content type of text, they're both words you read whether it's in print or electronic format so content type doesn't deal at all with the physical aspect of an item media type gets a little bit more specific it deals with kind of how you interact with something so video items whether it's a DVD or a streaming video and these two examples they both have the same media type of video even though their physical aspect is different and carrier type again these same two items they would have the same media type but they have different carrier types the carrier type for a DVD would be video disc and the carrier type for a streaming video would be online resource so this tells you a little bit about how you actually interact with something physically I will say that I think these are not currently made the best use of a lot of times they just kind of sit in the record as you can see this one over here has content type text, media type unmediated carrier type and volume that all means this right here is a book and most library patrons or even librarians are not necessarily going to know what that means this one over here the content type is cartographic image the media type is unmediated which basically just means you don't need a special device in order to view it you just pull it in your hand and interact with it and a carrier type is sheet all of that is to say this here is a map so it's not as as having that GMD right there in the title field I guess those are kind of the two complaints about it one that it's not right there in your 245 field which can your title field which can be a good thing or a bad thing I've always thought it was a little bit incongruous because it's not title information but it is right there in your search results which is a nice thing for people to kind of have a say hey this is an e-book or this is a map so and then the other complaint is that people don't know what the heck this stuff means I'm hoping that I wouldn't know the unmediated meaning of it yeah especially yeah what the heck is unmediated it just means you don't need anything fancy to deal with it you just hold it in your hand and read it so I'm hoping that these will be used more in the future to maybe do like faceted search results and you type in a term and then you see on the side if you want something electronic click here if you want a print book click here some catalogs already do this you know worldcat.org they do that but hopefully this will make it easier or maybe there'll be icons text plus unmediated plus volume all adds up to an icon that looks like a book cartographic image plus unmediated plus sheet all adds up to something that represents map and so those can be included in search results some people are trying to do some things more like the GMD this is the Oregon State Library catalog they have taken I think the carrier type so the most physical representation of what an object is and they put it right there in the search results next to the title kind of like what the GMD used to do online resource shows up this is yeah these are all video discs down here there's a different one and these slides will be available later so you can look at them more closely because I know that these are probably not that easy to read but so this is kind of gives the same overall visual effect of the GMD so a lot of people have been complaining about the GMD being gone and so some people are trying to alleviate those complaints with the workarounds the thing about RDA is that it doesn't say at all how to display this stuff it just tells you what information to put in your record and kind of use the display up to your local system which is kind of the direction we were moving anyways so getting a lot more local control so you can customize it to what your system does or what you want it to do move pieces of information around as you need to and again ASR2 was very locked into the catalog card it all has to look the same and so RDA says a lot less about how things have to display which is good and bad I would say some catalogs they are again using that carrier type once you know they had that list of results once you actually click into the item record sometimes I'll have a format field and you'll see this is volume which again for a book is not extremely intuitive it works a lot better with online resource so they have added that carrier type to the record instead of displaying all three and having people go I don't know what the heck a text on mediated volume is at least volume makes slightly more sense or online resource especially makes more sense having these things for text items at all is something different on the ASR2 it was kind of understood that for a book you didn't use the GMD at all so seeing something like volume for a book is taking some getting used to so for that one someone has a question is it not really dear wants to know so what would a DVD look like what would there let's see it would have let me go back to some of the list of terms here yeah well the content type would be two-dimensional moving image that is probably the least understandable thing you could see the media type would be video and the carrier type would be video disc so again the video media type would have VHS, DVD streaming video things like that and then video disc would be the carrier type let's see we saw it in one of the search results here yeah this one said video disc you will notice that this still doesn't specify between DVDs and Blu-rays for example which was a critique of catalog workers under ACR2 and some people are still wondering why you didn't take an extra step further right I'm guessing the rationale behind that would have something to do with formats changing all the time and you know they figure video disc is a fairly large category you can see there at the bottom if you look at the call numbers in the call number this they put in parenthesis DVD as part of the try at least get the point across we're using video disc because that's what RDA says but here's something that will actually tell you what the heck this thing is still some workaround needed a lot of people will put in a note field that says DVD or yeah like the call number like that and you do know there's been DVD and Blu-ray because we don't have a glory for it exactly you're kind of out of luck if you get a DVD so yeah it's important and that is one critique of RDA is that they still don't address that issue but I'm guessing they wanted to be kind of format neutral a little bit to allow for future developments I don't know let's see oh good I hope that answers the question another thing that you might notice when you look at RDA records is this thing called relationship designators remember I told you that because it's based on Ferber relationships are very important in RDA and one of the relationships they emphasize is these relationships between creators of a resource and the resource itself and they want to make these very explicit back under ASDR2 it was kind of assumed that if something is in the title field and something else is in the author field then that person wrote that book now they want to make that very explicit and so there are relationship designators that you will see for example after the author's name it has a relationship designator that tells you as you can see there can be multiple people with the same relationship designator under any given resource and it doesn't just apply to authors for example the publisher could be have a relationship as well in this case it's a program of the university of Naraz-Billingen and we call them the issuing body so these all come from a list of terms in RDA I think you can add ones if you have a relationship that doesn't exist but there is a list to choose from in RDA it's not just for authors, editor for example is another type of relationship designator but basically we just want to be very specific about how all these people relate to this resource and you'll see you might in the last screen I thought it was kind of superfluous that we have author and then author designation but you'll see that a lot of our systems code any person as author when really they're the editor so the relationship designator does serve a purpose beyond what our systems normally do you will also see that corporate bodies can be considered authors if you have for example a report issued by a government office under certain situations they can be considered so it might look a little weird but sometimes you'll see a corporate name and then the relationship designator of author and you can have many many many people with many many many relationship designators under one item you will definitely see this a lot with video recordings, films, things like that there are relationship designators for directors, producers screenwriters, actors and so on and so forth that one person can have multiple roles Steve McQueen in this example is both the director and the producer John Ridley is both the screenwriter and the producer so you can assign multiple relationship designators to the same person for a particular resource so those are kind of like I said the nitty gritty the nuts and bolts of what is going to be different now and you might think looking at it that well this isn't that big of a deal as money developing this whole new set of rules and we're spelling out abbreviations that's the big change and I admit a lot of times it's really easy to get caught up in things like that and kind of miss the forest for the trees so I always, even when talking to people who aren't necessarily cataloging on a daily basis I always like to talk a little bit about the big picture what could come next in the future with RDA why are we really doing this things that were kind of held back by our current mark environment and things could be more different in the future than they currently are I like to always point out the concept of so called ferberized catalog interfaces we're seeing some of these now even if they're not necessarily using RDA but hopefully they'll become more widespread I would say ferberized catalogs are basically catalogs in which they try to bring together sort of the more abstract work and then give you options to choose the more particular item so this is actually a catalog and I have a link for on the next slide if you're curious about the URL but the online audio visual catalogers group or OLAC they have done kind of a prototype of working with moving images so movies and so if you search for Dracula you get a result that will bring every possible representation of the 1958 version of Dracula together so you get that as a list number one and instead of seeing a whole cluttered up list where these might all appear separately you see there's a 35 millimeter film version of it there's a 16 millimeter film version there's a couple different VHS versions of it but it's all basically the same work there is the URL for that one the first one the OLAC moving image discovery interface SCARESO is a similar project it came out of Indiana University only it deals with music music in particular I think could benefit from a fibrous catalog because you know there are so many different classical pieces that you know could appear one particular piece of music could appear on several different albums a Mozart French horn concerto could be on a compilation of a bunch of different Mozart music and it could also be on a compilation of a bunch of different French horn concertos and so if you want to be able to search for one particular piece of music without knowing the title of the CD you could benefit from a fibrous interface another example is OSTLIT this is put out by the National Library of Australia and it does require a subscription to actually access the database but they do have a sample page of sample surface so if you're curious at all you can go to that link and I know Krista is collecting all these links that will be available with the recording later yes I don't know if you want to write all these down and scroll them down we'll have them all in our delicious account afterwards because there are some more even messier URLs coming later so definitely don't worry about it don't even try so for Breuys catalog I think is something that could be made possible by RDA I also think that new search options different ways for people to search our catalog could be a possibility what I mean by that if you kind of want to see what I'm talking about in practice you can always go to openlibrary which is openlibrary.org and they try you can type in the name of a book or whatever but you can also search by author for example here is a screenshot of a sample search I did for Jane Austen and you don't just get a list of things that she has written although they are here they're down here but you get a little bit of biographical sketch of her her birth and death dates you get subjects that she wrote about places that are related to her there's a bunch of items that actually treats the author as an entity rather than just a name on a catalog record it again kind of goes back to Ferber on those relationships it brings out the relationship for this author to a book and also kind of ties in various aspects of this author's her life things about her so this is facilitated in RDA by Richard Authority Records it contains lots of information about things like an author's gender and author's associated dates when they lived associated places so right now people kind of need to come to our catalogs to a certain extent knowing what they're looking for you can do a known item search for Jane Austen but instead you could come to our catalogs under RDA and search for women authors and then narrow it down for women authors from England and then narrow it down from women authors from England who wrote in the 1800s and you would discover Jane Austen and a bunch of other people that you might be interested in if you didn't have such a specific interest if you kind of wanted to be able to noodle around a little bit more and more creatively interact with our catalog records so that is something that I'm particularly excited about with RDA I really hope that future catalog interfaces will make things like that possible at this point you might be wondering well why aren't we doing this now and the answer is Mark machine readable cataloging is the computer format that all of our records are in right now and it's really pretty restrictive mainly because nobody else uses it it's just a librarian thing we were really ahead of the time in the 1960s when Mark was developed nobody else was really doing computer science stuff like this but we've kind of stayed stuck there in the 1960s and the computer science web development world has gone way beyond what librarians have done Mark is based on limited storage space back when computers couldn't really store what they can now and again it's very library specific so it's just really limiting it prevents us from being able to see those kind of individual elements of RDA and the relationship between things and so work is underway the Library of Congress is doing a project to develop an alternative to Mark BibFrame is the term you'll hear tossed around that's kind of an abbreviation for the bibliographic framework transition initiative it's not really an acronym but they always put it in all caps like that I don't know why but bibframe.org is the site to go to if you're interested in this it is a technology based on linked data which is another kind of buzzword going around that you might have heard these days I won't go into that right now because that could be a whole presentation on its own and everything in fact I think I've done that before so see the recording of that if you want more information about that but just know that if RDA seems to be just about things like spelling out abbreviations and including all the others names we are currently being held back by Mark and there is something underway to change the computer coding behind how all this works so that being said let's kind of bring this all back a little bit to more practicalities RDA in your library what do you need to worry about like I said if you're doing copy cataloging chances are good that you have RDA records in your catalog so what we see differently what type of things you have to make decisions about you might notice things like split authority files the things I said before about spelling out abbreviations those don't apply just to bibliographic records they apply to authority records a big one is the word department is now spelled out in authority this affected me a lot because I work with state government documents so anything that used to be DEPT period is now department and you might be able depending on your system to do kind of a global search your catalogers might be able to do a global search and replace and you know change everything and download new authority records from the Library of Congress but in case they don't have time to get to that or you just have so many authority records you can't do that at the time being you may have a split authority file so somebody was browsing your catalog by corporate author the stuff that is under department of roads spelled out would be separate from DEPT of roads so be aware of that you may need to go through and change authority records in order to avoid this from happening sometimes depending on your system those relationship designators I talk about those might be enough to cause a split file I'm lucky in that our catalog here is programmed to recognize that these are relationship designators and not part of an author's name so it doesn't alphabetize them or take them into account but some catalogs you might find out that Arthur Conan Doyle's name with a relationship designator after it is considered to be a totally different heading from just his name and it's on its own so again depending on how much your users browse by author name this may or may not be a big deal but it's something you probably want to check into do a test search and see if you're getting things like this and you may have to take that into account and unfortunately we're at the point where if your system can't handle it you may decide to delete relationship designators for the time being we're kind of really in a state of flux here where a lot of ILS systems just don't can't handle all the changes yet so but that's something to check for do a test search for an author or an author's name with a relationship designator and see if you're getting anything funny like this things you might notice you might need to make sure that the catalog is indexing and displaying the correct fields you know I didn't really get into Mark fields too much in this one but one difference with when it comes to Mark coding is that under ACR2 and the old Mark Records publication information used to appear in the 260 field and now it's in a 264 field so if your ILS system is only set up to display to 60 any record that you have coming in with the 264 field when it displays to the public it's going to look like it doesn't have any publication information which is not a good thing so you need to either get in there yourself or talk to your IT person and say hey I need to make sure that everything that needs to be displayed is being displayed so do some test searchers look through and see if you see anything funny where for example the publishing information is not displayed I had to go into our back end of our catalog and make sure that it's considering both 264 and 260 to be a valid publishing field for example so this is the front end of those two records and even though they have different fields they both display publishing info if I had not changed it that one on the left it would be missing that field entirely so that is something to keep in mind make sure that they're displaying correctly and if there's any fields you have that are searchable that are affected by this you want to make sure that if your patrons are able to search by publisher you want to make sure that search is checking for both 260 and 264 fields for example you may be curious as to whether you need to convert all of your old AACR2 records to RDA I would say you definitely don't need to it's designed to be kind of backwards compatible to work with AACR2 records you know people with larger collections are obviously not going to have the time to do that but that being said there are some vendors that do offer this as a service if you are curious to do this and I know I've seen presentations from even large academic research libraries where they've gone ahead and done this with thousands or millions of records so yeah again I don't think it's totally necessary because again I think your patrons will be okay if they see one record that has p-period and one record that has pages spelled out I would definitely prioritize making authority changes before I would recommend going through and changing all of your bibliographic records but archive and backstage library works both do offer those services and those are the URLs there for that market is a free program you can download it yourself and they have a feature they call RDA helper that will take records and convert them to RDA so if you wanted to try and do it yourself again it's not going to be totally perfect because it's all based on algorithms and you know it probably won't convert everything totally correctly but if you would like to try converting records you can do it yourself with market it again I feel like this is not a totally necessary version but if you want to explore this those these are the URLs to check out I told you more like the URLs are coming and here they are we'll have those linked so please yeah do not copy them down whenever I give presentations I like to throw a lot more resources at people because I can't possibly cover everything in an hour and I want to make sure you are exposed to some of the other good resources out there the first link is a webinar that was given by ALA their technical services division it's from I think 2010 so it's a little bit old but still I think it covers the basics pretty well the second link on there is a presentation or the notes from presentation that at Omaha Public Library here in Nebraska gave to her public services staff so it's you know the basics of what you as a public services librarian need to know again along those lines an article from 2012 or a blog post I should say RDA for public services I found that to be a useful resource as well and RDA an introduction for reference librarians again is another article from 2012 another resource I'll point you towards is the Nebraska RDA practice group Wickey there was a group of us here in Nebraska who for about a year leading up to the implementation date in March 2013 we got together once a month and practiced creating RDA records so as we went along we kind of collected examples the stuff we worked through in each session various resources that we found presentations that we've given so our Wickey is RDApractice.pvworks.com and you don't have to log in to have an account just to view everything there so that's a good resource and then the one non-web resource I will point out here is the RDA workbook this kind of grew out of the RDA practice group we had an article published in library journal about our group and we were contacted by a publisher to ask if we would be interested in publishing a book based on our experiences and teaching people RDA so a group of I think about six or seven of us in Nebraska catalogers we published the RDA workbook and that is available ABC Clio is the publisher I know it's also on Amazon and everything so I did want to give a little plug for that and that is basically it does anybody have any questions? Yes we did have one question that came in when we were talking and that wants to know was there a precursor to Ferber if it would have been considered the thing before that for this similar type of that's a good question I would say no not explicitly I think that was the first time I really tried to the Ferber was kind of like hey we're doing this anyway let's make it formal Ferber is not necessarily a departure from what we've been doing it's just kind of let's think about this in a very more concrete manner they finally decided that it was needed to make it more explicit what we were the heck we were doing and thinking about Ferber kind of makes it possible to do things like the more Ferberized catalog they were talking about but I think it really just kind of makes explicit a lot of things that were kind of floating around in catalogers heads for a while that's a good question okay anybody have any other questions so that about five minutes or so five or ten minutes left if anybody has any questions, comments, thoughts on RDA or cataloging and there's my contact information there so if you think there's something after the fact I always hear to answer questions well nothing's coming in right way thank you very much Emily that was great I've we've done multiple sessions you did the frame and link data and a couple of sessions on RDA so I've said in an exam I don't get to use it like implement it or anything as actively in my job as some people might but it's good to know thank you I'm less afraid of RDA oh good hopefully all of you are a little yes it's not scary and it actually seems overall making it easier to make it more simple and also more flexible you can do more with it it's not as restrictive as some of the systems that we've done it I will say I think it's easier for the user and honestly I think it's easier for catalogers too I mean it's a little bit intimidating when you're coming in but for new catalogers I teach graduate school library classes and the first year that I taught RDA the amount of traffic on discussion boards and emails I was bombarded with it went way way down it's easier for new catalogers to get so that's a good thing no urgent questions have come in just yet so thank you very much everyone for attending thank you very much Emily that will wrap it up for this week's show the show has been recorded as I said so it will be available on our website and later day along with all these PowerPoint slides we posted as well to our slideshare accounts you can access to them and all of the links that are mentioned there will be included in our delicious accounts so you can see them there so that will wrap it up for this morning I hope you join us next week when our topic is Teen Tech Time a remix fund with Mozilla WebMaker tools the Mozilla Foundation has come out with some tools that people can use to make their own websites to create web pages all sorts of fun things and Melissa Techman is from elementary school in Virginia she's going to be joining us on the show to talk about how she's gotten her teens into learning how to do coding and using HTML and CSS that's what you can do with this they call Thimble is their online HTML editor you can use it she's created some programming for the teens so definitely join us next week for that and sign up for any of our other shows you can see they're all listed here on our website the upcoming episodes the topics will be our recordings are listed here right below archived and cup as live sessions links we'll be able to go to see all of the recordings of all of our shows going back to the very beginning we started in cup as live in 2009 so you can go all the way back there and see all of our previous shows are on our archive page other than that we are on Facebook as you can see here so if you are a big Facebook user you can go ahead and click there and like us on our Facebook page we have announcements when shows are coming recordings are available reminders you can see here for when today's show is starting up so you can see that there if you like us now you can be the 200th person yeah somebody you can be the 200th person to like our encompass live page we're at 199 we're at 199 somebody bring us over the top there alright thank you very much everyone and we'll see you next time bye bye