This article describes in detail the management of a Resource Description and Access (RDA) implementation process by an academic library that was an early adopter of RDA. It identifies the necessary decisions to be made and discusses the rationale behind these decisions during the implementation process. This information can benefit other libraries with managing their local RDA implementations. The authors examine the business case behind implementation from various perspectives such as administrative support, training, documentation, establishment of local procedures and costs. It aims to help cataloging/technical services/metadata managers understand the scope of the process and the impact it will have on their libraries.

Understanding the Why: A Case Study in Managing the RDA Implementation

Knowledge organization standards are important community artifacts that set forth agreed upon specifications and protocols, and though they may appear neutral they have been shown to harbor specific perspectives. These perspectives are often covert but hold implications for the ways in which knowledge is conceptualized, organized, and represented. Values are deeply held preferences for ways of acting and ways of being, and represent an effective lens for examining the perspectives embedded in societal practices and artifacts. To date, however, knowledge organization standards have not been approached through formal value analysis. This study addresses this gap through an examination of the influential library standard Resource Description and Access (RDA), specifically focusing on what values are present within this standard, how these values are communicated, and how they are recognized and responded to by practitioners. To address these questions, a qualitative, exploratory, multiphase study was conducted, utilizing value and rhetorical analyses of the text of RDA as well as open-ended interviews with RDA practitioners focused on their interpretations of the document. Findings show that RDA upholds its design principles through the expression of principles-based values and values associated with user needs, communicated through a set of routine structures such as directives and conditionals. In their usage of RDA, catalogers place greater emphasis on values associated with users and their perspectives, and see access as the most important value within this standard. At the same time, the relative absence of asserted community values such as privacy and autonomy illustrates the challenged nature of human values in knowledge organization standards. Findings from this study demonstrate the integral nature of values in standards, and position value analysis as a useful methodology in the critical study of standards in all domains. For the knowledge organization and cultural heritage communities, this work reveals the ways in which standards and their enactments serve to mediate key community values. In raising questions about the role of human values in knowledge organization standards, this study also contributes to ongoing discussions of information ethics and professional values. Values in Knowledge Organization Standards: A Value Analysis of Resource Description and Access (RDA)

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Values in Knowledge Organization Standards: A Value Analysis of Resource Description and Access (RDA)

In this article the authors present a case study implemented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library that trained catalogers in Resource Description and Access (RDA), a new cataloging code. The authors provide detailed descriptions of the library's in-house training sessions and the strategies behind these sessions. They also discusses the creation of digital tools used to facilitate the creation of quality RDA bibliographic records. The authors close by contextualizing RDA training within the library linked data initiative.

Implementing RDA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library

This research explored the implementations and perceptions of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) cataloguing standard in Europe. It refers to the development and implementation of the standard among Anglo-American libraries and draws comparisons between them. It examines the spread and application of RDA throughout Europe both by analysing the available literature and by conducting interviews with professionals at 12 European national libraries. The results highlight the issues faced by the European institutions and the unique perspectives that emerge from implementing RDA in different languages and cultures. European institutions demonstrate a higher level of involvement and interest in the development of RDA and a stronger desire to work towards RDA interoperability and alignment with the cultural heritage sector. The European implementation drives forward the internationalisation of RDA by actively seeking solutions to the issues in the new standard arising from the cultural and linguistic diversity.

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RDA in Europe : Implementations and perceptions

The cataloging community is at a crossroads. Will catalogers need to continue learning both Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2) and Resource Description and Access (RDA), or will learning RDA alone be enough? Through a selective literature review and examining the RDA Toolkit, it seems that there is currently a collective need to have access to both codes. However, when considering both Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging (LC-PCC) and OCLC initiatives and an example from this author's institution relating to authority control in RDA and bibliographic record hybridization, it may only be necessary to learn RDA in the future. Additional research into practitioner experience could be done in the future to further examine this.

AACR2 to RDA: Is Knowledge of Both Needed during the Transition Period?

This article discusses Resource Description and Access (RDA) and new catalogers' errors in Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed. (AACR2).

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Jean Harden

Papers

Inadvertent RDA: New Catalogers’ Errors in AACR2