The US' National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Agricultural Library (NAL) and the Library of Congress (LC) have announced an agreement for the implementation of Resource Description and Access (RDA), new cataloging rules published in June 2010 to replace Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2).
Concerns were raised in 2008 about how well RDA met its own self-stated goals, the costs of adopting new rules, and the lack of clear explanations of the new rules' benefits. Therefore, the US community, led by the senior management at the NLM, the NAL, and the LC had agreed to coordinate a US test of the rules and make a joint decision about whether or not the rules should be adopted. The US RDA Test Coordinating Committee was appointed in June 2008, with three members each from NLM and NAL and four members from LC. The test involved 23 partner institutions (libraries of various sizes and types, museums, archives, vendors, educators and students), in addition to the three national libraries. The test was conducted from July-December 2010, the results of the test were analysed from January-May 2011. The Coordinating Committee submitted its report and recommendations to their senior management on June 6, 2011.
Executives of the three national libraries, Dr. Simon Liu (NAL), Sheldon Kotzin (NLM) and Dr. Deanna Marcum (LC), recently issued a statement endorsing the recommendations made by the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee regarding the implementation of RDA. The statement noted that RDA should be implemented no earlier than January 2013 and is contingent upon the satisfactory progress/completion of nine specified tasks and action items outlined in the report.
While the full report will be made available prior to the upcoming American Library Association (ALA) Annual Meeting, which begins June 23, 2011, the executive summary of the report is available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/RDA_report_executive_summary.pdf
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