Thanks to the joint efforts from Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) institutions and the Library of Congress RDA (Resource Description and Access) project team, the Metadata Guidance Documentation (MGD) project was completed on January 31, 2022. MGD documentation will be used with the Official RDA Toolkit and the accompanying LC-PCC Policy Statements. MGD documentation gives detailed instructions and examples, expanding on the instructions in the Toolkit and the LC-PCC PSs. The PCC Task Group will test the Official RDA Toolkit to ensure that PCC catalogers can use the Toolkit to accurately catalog materials in various formats in both MARC and BIBFRAME. The decision to implement the Official RDA Toolkit will not be made before October 2022.

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the latest annual call for input from stakeholders involved in the lifecycle of creative works for the upcoming annual revision of the Recommended Formats Statement. The significant changes made in recent years in developing the ‘RFS 2.0’ represent the Library’s understanding of the growing importance of the Statement, which is used as a crucial tool in implementing the Library’s new Digital Collecting Strategy.
The Library of Congress is looking forward to hearing your thoughts by April 15, 2022 about how the latest version of the RFS is working and what might be improved, in order to better meet the needs of particular groups of users. The upcoming revision of the Statement is due out on June 30, 2022.

The end of January 2022 marked the third anniversary of ROR’s launch at PIDapalooza 2019 in Dublin. Continuing with a tradition from the prior two years (2020 in Lisbon, and 2021 on Zoom), the 2022 ROR annual meeting consisted of 2 virtual sessions with around 100 community members from 26 different countries. Participants reviewed developments from 2021, discussed upcoming milestones in 2022, heard from ROR adopters about how ROR IDs are being implemented in a variety of settings, and brainstormed ideas for the future.

Now available for purchase on the ALA Store website, Introduction to RDA: A Guide to the Basics after 3R, Second Edition is Christine Oliver’s primer guide to the RDA cataloging standard for library and information science students, records managers, catalogers, and other library professionals.  The new print book specifically covers the changes to RDA reflected in the official RDA Toolkit launched on 15 December 2021. ALA Digital Reference interviewed Christine Oliver about the revised RDA and resources that catalogers can use to build their command of it.  Read the complete interview.

The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) Review Group is announcing the release of the Update 2021 to the 2011 ISBD Consolidated Edition as a draft, awaiting an official publication early 2022. The developments made in this update extend the coverage of ISBD to a larger array of resources, optimize its ability for granular description, clarify and develop some of the elements, and bring more organization and refinements into the description of some types of resources.

The Library of Congress has been exploring ways to include ISNI in its Cataloging in Publication (CIP) records. In August 2021, the optional inclusion of ISNI for personal names was implemented. The CIP submission portal, PrePub BookLink, has been enhanced to enable publishers to supply ISNI for personal names as part of requesting CIP cataloging for their forthcoming books. CIP Program staff add the ISNI to the name authority record in the LC Name Authority File; they have added ISNI for 108 personal names to date. The project team is working next on automating the inclusion of ISNI in the bibliographic and authority records in the MARC 024 field.

See page 9 of Library of Congress Update for ALA LibLearnX, January 20, 2022

In December 2021 and January 2022, the American Library Association offered free RDA Toolkit demos in the French and Spanish languages respectively. Each demo featured an overview of RDA Toolkit’s features and functionality. Demos were recorded and posted to ALA YouTube channel for viewing at your convenience.

The PCC Policy Committee has decided that the PCC will not implement the Official (new) RDA Toolkit before October 2022. The reason for the added delay is that the site migration of the RDA Toolkit, including original RDA, has impacted the expected update schedule. Once these updates have been made, PCC is planning on conducting a testing period, beginning sometime in March or April of 2022. More information on this test will be coming soon. In the meantime, the PCC will continue to catalog using the Original RDA Toolkit.

Responding to interest in the library community and beyond, ISNI-International Agency is now making available key ISNI metadata in several Linked Data formats. The metadata covers assigned ISNI identifiers themselves and a subset of the associated information describing each one in the ISNI database. You can find more detailed information.

The persistent identifier systems (Persistent Identifiers, PIDs) such as Handle, DOI, ORCID and ROR that are currently used frequently in scientific publishing, have fundamental problems with regard to data security, data protection and ensuring data integrity due to their centralization. A possible solution to this is the system of DIDs: a new form of globally unique identifiers that can be generated by each individual or organization and operated on any platform that is considered trustworthy. At the end of the paper, the author presents five previously worked out requirements in relation to a contemporary implementation of persistent identifiers.