If you create or edit authority records, you should be aware that RDA no longer incorporates the terms “male,” “female,” and “not known” for gender, and that PCC policy is now to use terms from LCDGT (Library of Congress Demographic Group Categories Term and Code List) in field 375 ($2 lcdgt).
You can access LCDGT from ClassWeb. If you do not have ClassWeb access, you can retrieve a PDF document from the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate home page, though it will be slightly less current. Netanel Ganin of Brandeis University has also posted the terms in a more navigable page in the style of ClassWeb, and he plans to keep his list up to date with each update.
The terms in LCDGT can potentially be used in any setting where you need controlled, single-facet vocabulary for age, educational level, ethnic or cultural identification, gender, language, medical or psychological condition or disability, national or regional affiliation, occupation or field of activity, religion, sexual orientation, or other social group identification; so we may have occasion to refer to it in the future even if we are not assigning gender designations in authority records.
(Gender in authority records and in RDA will be discussed in a little more depth in a forthcoming post on Flaming Catheads.)
Catalogers working with music materials will want to be current with the Music Library Association’s Best Practices for Music Cataloging Using RDA and MARC21. Since February of last year, this document has been integrated with the RDA Toolkit (under the Resources tab). You need not be logged on to the Toolkit to access Best Practices, but the links to RDA instructions will not work unless you are.
If you want to consult a more traditionally formatted document, the old website of the former Bibliographic Control Committee of the Music Library Association has links to PDF files of Version 1.1 (the final version issued as a complete stand-alone PDF file), a list of changes between versions 1.01 and 1.1, and Supplements to Best Practices for Music Cataloging Using RDA and MARC21, version 1.5, 12 April 2016 (this last document is also available at the current website of MLA’s Cataloging and Metadata Committee). Be aware, of course, that the Toolkit-integrated document will presumably be more up to date.
Announced on the RSC website:
The RDA full record examples on the Toolkit website have been revised. The examples show authority and bibliographic records in both an RDA element view and a MARC encoding view of the record.
There are also two examples showing diagrams of specific RDA entities, elements, and relationships. More will be added later.
That examples page also includes a link to rball versions of some of the bibliographic examples; they are available in both RIMMF native RDA format and RDF linked data format.
These examples may be accessed from the RDA Toolkit website (http://www.rdatoolkit.org/examples/MARC) or from the link on the Tools tab in RDA Toolkit (http://access.rdatoolkit.org/).
The examples are freely available to all. No subscription to RDA Toolkit is required to access and download the examples.
Posted:23 May 2016
Walt Nickerson has recently published updated versions of his four macro books:
Walt’s Macros
The long list is in alphabetical order, so look in the middle for M: Macro book: Essentials; Macro Book: Extras1; Macro Book: Extras2; and Macro Book: MacroTools. There is also, right above these, a handy list of all the macros in the four books, “Macro book listing.”
Terry Reese announced new additions to MarcEdit on April 30. He has added a new tool, UNIMARC Tools, for moving data between MARC21 and UNIMARC, and a new option has been added to the Replace function.
Update on MarcEdit: Terry has just (as of today, May 13) announced that he plans a few more updates for the weekend. If you use MarcEdit and want to be up to date, it would be a good idea to subscribe to his list, MARCEDIT-L (MARCEDIT-L-request@listserv.gmu.edu).
Three Catalogers Walk Into a Blog 