DCMI/RDA TG: Six month report, Mar. 2011
1. RDA Group 1 Hierarchies completed, Feb. 2011
This was the last remaining portion of the basic work on the Group 1 portion of the vocabularies, and had been promised for completion prior to beginning the review by JSC. Also as part of this push, errors identified by specific groups and forwarded to the TG were corrected.
2. Discussions with JSC regarding review of the vocabularies
This has been ongoing, including email discussions and face-to-face meetings at ALA and other venues. John Attig, of the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (the U.S. group involved with RDA development--Diane is liaison to that group from DCMI), has begun reviewing the vocabularies on behalf of JSC and has been compiling an issues document.
3. Continuing discussion with Troy Linker, ALA Publishing, regarding integration of RDA Vocabs with the RDA Toolkit
Diane met with Troy at ALA Midwinter in San Diego, and discussed the issues around translations of the vocabularies and integration with the RDA Toolkit. Troy believes that progress can be made now that the first flurry of Toolkit post-release problems have been addressed. He has been negotiating with a number of language groups about formal translations of the guidance text, and has decided that having those groups begin work with the vocabularies rather than the text made the most sense. Diane reassured him that setting up those groups in the OMR (using the DNB model already in progress) could be done whenever the groups were ready.
4. Gordon is now meeting the representative of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals to JSC on a regular basis, to discuss the work of the Task Group. A JSC meeting planned for May 2011 in Glasgow has been postponed until later in the year, but it will be an opportunity to meet the whole of JSC face-to-face to discuss Task Group issues.
5. Diane’s keynote address to Code4Lib has resulted in renewed interest in RDA; discussions are ongoing about implementation meetings later this summer. An archived video stream of her presentation is available at http://www.indiana.edu/~video/stream/launchflash.html?format=MP4&folder=vic&filename=C4L2011_session_1_20110208.mp4
After her keynote (which prompted the technologists present to look at the vocabularies), there were a number of hallway discussions that should lead to useful implementations in the more forward looking areas of the library community.
6. Gordon discussed a number of issues arising from the development of an RDF representation of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), its relationship with classes and properties in the RDA namespace, its use of a Dublin Core Application Profile, and its relationship with DC terms, in a paper “ISBD and the Semantic Web” published in JLIS.it: Italian journal of library and information science and available at http://leo.cilea.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/4536
7. Gordon has recently been working on translations of English RDF labels, definitions, and scope notes with colleagues from Spain and Croatia. A number of issues have been identified which are applicable to translations of the RDA elements, which will be raised with the Task Group.
Gordon Dunsire
Diane Hillmann