Kia ora koutou,
After several years of hard work and preparation the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa has now begun using the Official RDA Toolkit when describing newly acquired resources for the published collections of the Library.
From August 1 2024 we began creating descriptions for static, text resources (i.e. print monographs (physical and digital)) and we will begin describing other formats including diachronic works (i.e. serials) and sound recordings from October 2024. We aim to be describing all formats using the Official RDA Toolkit by the end of 2024.
Our output will temporarily decrease but will increase as we become more familiar with using the new standard in our daily work.
NLNZ Policy and Guidance in the Official RDA Toolkit
As with Original RDA, all our policy and guidance is available in the Official RDA Toolkit, including all our decisions about the MARC fields we will use to encode RDA elements. You can find this by clicking on the documents link in the dark blue ribbon at the top of any RDA Toolkit page, then selecting the "Subscribe" tab. From here you can search by institution to find all our public documents.
Changes to MARC records
There will be some changes in our MARC records. Some of these were highlighted at the LIANZA conference last year and in the follow-up article in the December 2023 issue of Catapult (the newsletter of the LIANZA Cataloguing Special Interest Group), and again at the OCLC Cataloguing Community Meeting for libraries in Australia and New Zealand (May 2024). The recording for this meeting is available here: https://oclc.wistia.com/medias/awt6os4j02
This is the full list of the changes you will see in MARC records created by us from August 1 2024: https://natlib.govt.nz/librarians/cataloguing-standards-at-the-national-library/marc-record-changes-due-to-rda-implementation
We have had some direct discussions with cataloguing colleagues outside the National Library about these MARC changes, including the Kōtui Cataloguing Working Group, and are very happy to have more discussions! If you would like to have a chat about the MARC changes or our RDA implementation, please do get in touch with us at nznb@dia.govt.nz and we can set up a meeting. We have done some work to configure our discovery layer (Primo) to accommodate the changes to MARC and are happy to chat about this too.
Reminder that training materials are available
Finally, materials from our first phase of training, are freely available on the National Library Niche Academy site. We will continue to add more resources so do keep an eye on this site.
Please contact nznb@dia.govt.nz if you have questions or comments about the MARC changes, about our training materials, or anything else related to RDA.
Ngā mihi nui,
Anoushka
Anoushka McGuire | Team Leader, Cataloguing Team 1,
National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa
Direct Dial: +64 4 470 4524 | www.natlib.govt.nz
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