The pre-conference.

This afternoon, I attended part 1 of a pre-conference session entitled "RDA and Serials: Theoretical and Practical Applications." From the RDA website: "RDA (or) Resource Description and Access is the new standard for resource description and access designed for the digital world. Built on the foundations established by AACR2, RDA provides a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media."

The session was excellent, given by an expert in the field, attended by an audience eager to learn. It is clear to me that I have a lot of homework to do to really learn the material and become comfortable with it. For the most part though I was able to follow the speaker, understand the material, do the exercises, and enjoy the ambiguities and the overall complexity. I made note of a few "quotes" from our speaker. I say "quotes" in quotes because I might not have caught the words exactly as spoken.

"We all know that we are getting many more things to catalog and fewer people to do it with. We need to work smarter, more efficiently and still be able to exchange data."

"We have never done a good job of displaying serials data in the OPAC but is it worth trying to fix it (the soon to be obsolete system) now?"

"You know you don't just jump in. You need to make some (serials pre-cataloging) decisions."

"We'll have a lot of hybrid (AACR2 and RDA) records for a long time."

"There are so many more ways that the publishers can mess us up when material is in electronic format."

"Thomas Jefferson cut things out of the bible and then rearranged them. I would like to do the same with RDA."

"We'll talk about the creator (not that creator!) again."

As we came to the end of the session, I realized that I am woefully behind on my study of RDA and especially on section 19, the creator part. So, tonight, I had a look at section 19, after struggling to log in, after many months of inactivity, and I realized that I'd better just start at RDA Section 0: introduction.