RDA (Resource Description and Access)

"Forget Silicon Valley," writes publisher Tim O'Reilly in a Forbes.com article:

It turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive. Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun. I call these people "alpha geeks." They are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its originator expected.

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While munching on a sandwich, I asked Jon Phipps some questions about the Metadata Registry, while Diane Hillmann, Karen Coyle, and Nannette Naught (colored pencils in hand) pored over RDA's Entity Relationship (ER) diagram on 3 x 4 foot sheets. During my first week of the new year, I spent a couple days observing discussions on RDA as a data model.

ALA Publishing is working with Metadata Management Associates and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Metadata Registry project in the development of the software for RDA. The Metadata Registry has already developed key modules of software that ALA will need and has more in the works. With element lists and vocabularies for the new standard likely to change, the Metadata Registry can create a central, stable space for maintenance. The software can also generate schemas, which will be available for free download from the RDA website. Read More »

(If you're at ALA Annual Conference/>/> while you're reading this, the RDA Update Forum is Saturday, June 23, 4:00-5:30 at WCC 206.)
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