The following message appeared on both the RDA and Autocat listservs in the last few days. "Dear Colleagues: The PowerPoint presentations and speaker notes from the IFLA RDA Satellite Meeting held in conjunction with the 2008 IFLA Conference are now available on the JSC website. You can find them at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rda.html#presentations Cordially, Marjorie Marjorie E. Bloss, RDA Project Manager 2827 West Gregory Street Chicago, Illinois 60625 USA 1-773-878-4008 1-773-519-4009 (mobile) Marjorie_Bloss@msn.com " I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the satellite meeting and can thoroughly recommend all the presentations. Barbara Tillett's provides an excellent background to the development of RDA and a rather lovely look at British Library catalogue book catalogue records from the perspective of FRBR. Deirdre Kiorgaard's presentation looks more closely at RDA itself, and Anders Cato provides an interesting non-Anglo perspective on RDA. Published formats and costs: A publisher's representative was also at the meeting and there were a number of questions about costs, the possibility of a print version of RDA, and the possibility of other versions for special use (e.g. map or music cataloguing). It was clear that no decisions had been made about any of the issues raised, but once there is a final version of RDA we may get more information about formats and costs. It did seem unlikely that a print version will be available as a first release of RDA. International rules? Another point that I found particularly interesting was the level of interest from the European community. Germany and Sweden seemed keen to adopt RDA as their national cataloguing code and there was also interest from Japan and other countries. RDA looks like becoming an international standard to a greater extent than AACR. MARC. There was relatively little information about MARC - although there has been a discussion paper about RDA and MARC and some decisions were announced at this year's ALA. Library systems: The reactions of system vendors to RDA were not raised at the seminar and it seems likely that the vendors are waiting for a final release of RDA (and probably the MARC changes) before working out the implications of the new rules for their systems. The timeline from the meeting was as follows: Oct. 13 2008 - - RDA Final draft online for review - (doesn't contain full range of workflow and personalisation tools that will come with the final product) Jan 19 2009 - - Review period ends early March 2009 - Final review by Joint Steering Committee 3rd quarter 2009 - RDA release early-mid 2010 -Implementation decisions from LC and other major libraries - Pam Gatenby's presentation includes more information about evaluation plans of national libraries. If anyone wants to follow up with me on any of the points above please feel free to get in touch. Chris Todd Chris (Christine) Todd Team Leader, Monos Plus Team, Content Services, National Library of New Zealand. Telephone: (04) 474 3093 Fax: (04) 474 3161 Email: chris.todd@natlib.govt.nz