Are You Ready for March 31 and the New RDA Guidelines? We are.

With the March 31 implementation date set by the Library of Congress and several other national libraries for the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) cataloging guidelines quickly approaching, the library community is buzzing with questions. What are you doing? What are we doing? Is anyone ready?

We are. We’ve spent the past year ensuring two of our premier services (360 MARC Updates and the Summon® service) affected by the new RDA cataloging guidelines are ready to meet your needs. Our team of metadata librarians have undergone RDA training and set up support for RDA in both services. And we are making it easy for you to take advantage of the new guidelines.

Summon® service support for new RDA guidelines begins April 1^st

Support for RDA in the Summon service for clients who use MARC 21 will be an incremental process with the first changes being available on April 1, and then with additional changes coming later. With the initial rollout of the RDA support, Summon indexing will change as follows:

• Publication Place: 260$a, 264--1$a
• Publisher: 260$b, 264--1$b (Will use the first value found with this order of priority)
• Publication Date: 260$c, 264--1$c, 264--4$c (Will use the first value found with this order of priority)
• Genre: add 380$a to existing Genre field mappings

Customers can use the Ask A Question form in the Support Center to request additional fields they would like to have included in the Summon index, request additional changes to their mapping, or request not have the above changes applied.

360 MARC Updates support for RDA available now

As of November 2012, the 360 MARC Updates service included modified RDA format records to ensure a seamless experience for end users. The updated reports include more Library of Congress records, which means subscribers receive more and better data.

Since all new Library of Congress records will be in RDA record format starting March 31, 2013, we implemented system improvements to the 360 MARC service and augmented our default record template to modify the RDA records so that they are sent to you in as close to AACR2 format as possible. Changes include:

• Adding the 245$h subfield to records and stripping the 33x fields
• Removing the subfield e from 1xx / 7xx fields
• Moving data from the 264 field into a 260 field as appropriate

If you do not subscribe to either of these services but want to learn more, please contact us.

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