At Copac we have been taking an interest in RDA and related developments for the past few years, but this has been very much a sideline activity. However, when the Library of Congress announced the results of their RDA trial and the British Library followed with their own timetable for moving to RDA we decided it was time to consider the implications for both the RLUK cataloguers’ database and the Copac service in more detail.
Anything we do in relation to the RLUK database will be agreed in collaboration with RLUK and the member libraries, whilst we also need to talk with our other contributors regarding their views on this change to RDA as this will impact directly on Copac. So to get things started we carried out a short survey, to get an impression of what our contributing libraries are planning.
A summary report (PDF) is available.
In short, out of 35 respondents just over half are definitely moving to RDA, with just under half still undecided. Only 2 libraries are definitely not moving. The timescale ranged from within a year to over 2 years, though again for about a third of libraries this has not yet been decided. Of those libraries not having decided to move to RDA, 5 will be accepting RDA records within their local catalogue, but for most others this was an area of uncertainty.
We received a range of general comments on the move to RDA, including areas such as interest in the actions of system suppliers and other libraries; concerns about training and a desire for support; and the effect of changes in the cataloguing environment being a long-term driver to move to RDA.
We will be working with RLUK and our other contributing libraries take this work forward. And in the longer term we will be exploring the potential of RDA to offer new ways of working with the data to support our user communities.