Teaching RDA After 3R (Transcript)
- 1. ROUGH EDITED COPY ALA Teaching RDA after 3R Remote CART Captioning Monday, August 19, 2019, 1145-130pm CART CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC** * * * * * THIS IS BEING PROVIDED IN A ROUGH-DRAFT FORMAT. COMMUNICATION ACCESS REALTIME TRANSLATION (CART) IS PROVIDED IN ORDER TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION ACCESSIBILITY AND MAY NOT BE A TOTALLY VERBATIMRECORD OF THE PROCEEDINGS * * * * >> Hi, everyone. This is Colton Ursiny with ALA publishing doing another sound check. We're five minutes away from our start time. Thanks to those of you who have introduced yourselves in the chat space. If you haven't already, chime in, we'd love to hear who you are, where you are, anything else you would like to share. We'll do a sound check when we get started at noon Eastern and between sound checks there will be only silence. Thank you. >> Colton: Hi, everyone. This is Colton Ursiny with ALA publishing to come on to do another sound check. We're a few minutes from the start time. If you haven't already, introduce your group or yourself in the chat space underneath the screen. We'll start in about two minutes so stay tuned. Thank you.
- 2. >> Colton: Okay. It's noon eastern time. We're going to go ahead and get started. Thanks for being with us today. I'm Colton Ursiny with ALA publishing and we're happy to teach our webinar, teaching RDA after 3R with Brian Dobreski. We'll cover some brief technical stuff and get right to it. The chat space is on the right side of the screen. Some chat has occurred in the area. You can chat in that space at any time. If you don't see the chat window, click on the chat icon in the bottom menu row. Today's event is being live captioned. You can view the captions in the multimedia viewer in the lower right-hand side of your screen. If you see an external site message in the viewer, click continue as it is a safe site. If you have technical questions, questions about audio or web ex, we ask that you private chat "host," we will help you personally without interrupting other discussion and chat. Pull down the window in chat space and go to user host. And then type your chat and it will go directly to us. We'll have Q&A at the end to request questions. Type your questions to the chat space and make sure that the to box is to all participants. We might not get to everysingle question. If your audio breaks up or drops out in the presentation, you can reconnect by either hanging up or closing the audio broadcast window. Then click communicate to the top of your screen and get the three dots icon in the bottom menu row and select either. Then I will call in or computer. If you're listening through audio broadcast, make sure you don't have two audio broadcast windows open simultaneously. If you do, close one. The internet audio qualify can be affected by any other factors in network speed or traffic. If you have trouble, click disconnect and reconnect. We are recording this presentation. Within a day, you'll get an e-mail to the length and full recording including the audio, video, and chat record. ALA offers an array of on-line courses throughout the year. You can view additional opportunities on the ALA store. We're thrilled to have Brian Dobreski with us for today's event. He's an assistant director at the school of information sciences at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. His research focuses on knowledge organization practices with the emphasis on the implications of standards. As an instructor, he's taught cources on information organization, metadata, cataloging, and classification. He holds a PhD. In information science from Syracuse University and worked previously as a catalog library at the eastman school of music. With all of that out of the way, we're going to turn things over to Brian, welcome. >> Thank you, Colton. Can you hear me all right? >> Yeah, coming through loud and clear. >> Okay. Sounds good. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you, everybody, for being here today to talk more about how we're going to approach teaching RDA following the three R revisions here. So, before I get started, I just wanted to give a few quick notes on the assumed audience and objectives for today's webinar. So, this presentation is geared towards those of us who are responsible for teaching RDA. As such, the presentation isn't really about how to use post 3R, RDA, per se, but how to teach people to use it. I'm going to try to cover advice for both classroom and work place settings, but due to the variety of work place
- 3. scenarios, I won't be able to give as specific of advice here. And, of course, I assume that folks here today are familiar with the current version of RDA. Now, even those of you who are not formally responsible for teaching RDA may get something out of this today, though. If you're in that boat, if not, stay tuned. The presentation might help you in approaching self- teaching, for instance. So our objectives, two main objectives today, first, to help teachers prepare new approaches and materials for teaching RDA after 3R. And the second objective is to better understand and explain how the RDA tool kit, what is now the beta site, can be use in both reference and practice. Or another way to think about this is how to help learners develop their mental map of RDA following 3R. In light of our objectives, I'm going to present on four main areas that are in line with major questions associated with teaching post-3R, RDA. What is it? We'll cover basic background, outline prerequisite s for approaching RDA, and offer some suggestions for background for teachers and learners. In the second section, what should teachers know? I won't be covering all aspects but I'll try to highlight the aspects that I feel are most important for the instructors to begin becoming comfortable with. I'll go over some of the major conceptual differences as well as major navigational and functional changes that could have an impact on the way you teach. On the third section, what should students know? We're going to highlight some of the ways in which new learners can begin to approach understanding and working with post-3R RDA with consideration from advanced learners as well. Finally, I'll conclude with brief remarks outlining my overall recommendations for timeline and for method methods for teaching post 3R RDA. Suggestions, comments, as well in the time we have for questions and answers. So, moving in to the first part of our presentation today, what is post-3-R RDA. Starting 2014, the co- publishers of the RDA and the tool kit began a project to enhance RDA. Though, the text of RDA has been updated over time,the tool kit itself has remains consistent in presentations since, you know, the 2010,2013 era. So this seeks to accomplish a major change in RDA and content itself including objects of description, instruction, concepts, and terminology, as well as the interface and the functionality, as well as the presentation of the tool kit. As instructors, it's important that we note that these changes are significant enough that many of our current materials that we rely on will become outdated or more difficult to use, and will require some modification, hence, some of our discussion here today. Why did this happen? Is recapping this here? Well, obviously the data environment is involved far beyond the AACR2 days and in the last ten year since the initial debut of RDA. There's more resources that need to be presented. More metadata available from more diverse sources. There's a high need for metadata automation. There's a high need for data reuse. The bibliographic domain needs to keep up with the increasing pace of environment. So the design changes are designed to help the bibliographic domain do that. It's developed to have interoperability of the tool kit and the instructions and the data with the result mate goal of improving data performance, user experience, catalog our work, and so on. The content changes are changes in the conceptual model. The LRM, we'll talk more about that in a moment. As far as the presentation changes, the interface changes are designed to update RDA from a kind of a pseudolinear document to a data base or repository style that reflects data base practices. Circling back, all of the changes are also supposed to better support integration of bibliographic data to the web data which is an increasing part of the overall data environment. Looking at the timeline, what will happen when? The current RDA tool kit text is still in use. The beta tool itself has been available for some time. It features the new content and presentation. It's a good time to get to know it. Most won't be cataloging with it just yet. In the coming months, the RDA steering committee will announce the changeover and the site will be
- 4. the official site and open for business, right? For cataloging workf profiles and best practices aren't available at the moment.They'll be available soon. We'll talk about application profiles throughout our time together today. And what is now the current RDA tool kit will be a Deppry dated -- deprecated legacy document that is to remain for another year after that changeover. Oh, I went backwards. So, most systems are underpinned by a conceptual model. They help to define what things are of interest and what kinds of information you can know about these things. Previously the RDA was influenced by the fur family of models. These models have been put in one, LRM, or the library reference model. LRM features an expanded and altered set of entitiesalong with updated attributes and relationships. Many of the changes in post-3R RDA are incorporated to have these differences into RDA. So we will go over briefly the conceptual differences as theyappear in RDA. But first, learning more about LRM before approaching the new version of RDA is prettyimportant. Suggestions about where to go for further information on library reference model here. From IFLA's official page, I would recommend the document itself. It's not terriblylong. So for teachers and practitioners, I would suggest working through the entire documents if you haven't already. For students, the odd chapters 1, 3, and 5, and skim some of 4. You might have them read the whole thing. Alternatively, student s can be offered a suck sixty take. Zumr's article of encyclopedia of knowledge organization. It's a take on explaining the library reference model. Yes. What else to know? Okay. So, from its initial publications, RDA has drawn on another conceptual document that's important to know ahead of time. It's IFLA's ICP, the kind of modern descendants of the Paris principles, I suppose. The purpose is to establish underlying principles, like general overarching design guidance on approaches to cataloging. So things like representation and user convenience and so on. As well as objectives which is what users should do with catalog data. The ICP should be ready catalog -- be read by catalogers and teachers. Introductory courses, no it so much. For a little bit more background on the history of the principles and objectives, you can see Svenonius's text, the intellectual foundation of information organization known affectionately as the red devil. It's a great book. It's not something I would assign to introductory students, though you can see more about the history and development of the principles over time there. All right, user tasks. They're concrete encapsulation of what we're trying to help users do. Post 3R RDA looks for the user tasks that it's trying to enable, like looking across the three fur's as RDA did previously. You consult the library reference model chapter 3, it gives you an explanation of the five major user tasks we now find guiding RDA. Most of us are familiar with the first four, FISO, we now have a fifth, explore, which joins the tasks. It's to discover resources using the relationships between them and the place -- the resources in context. So, that fifth user task really highlights the value of relationship data, which we'll see as very important. It certainly has been important in RDA and continues to be important in this new version. What else to know first? Kind of moving a little beyond our direct object i today. There are more resources to get familiar with linked data. It's not required for student who have been introduced to linked data before they approach RDA. But at some point, the students are going to need to know more about this. So if you're looking for suggestions to introduce students or just yourself to linked data concepts, I have a few recommendations here as well. First, linked data involving the web into a global data space. This is the Heath and Bizer (phonetic) text. It gives a background on linked information and its principles. It's a free e-book. It's great because you can read it on line. I assign it to students who are learning Mata data and not those learning to do introductory cataloging.
- 5. It could still be useful. More related, schilling's work, transforming library metadata into linked library data and that gives us a history of linked data and bibliographic data and what desires have been. Focusing more on RDA and the three R revisions -- RDA and the three R revisions to RDA, you can consult a more recent presentation by Kathy Glennen about what we see in the RDA and the 3R project. Finally, I wanted to mention other resources. I won't go to all of the background information on RDA itself, but if you'd like to keep up with developments concerning RDA and 3R, I would suggest continuing to check in on the following resources regularly. Official outlets here, RDA tool kits blog site, and, of course, the RDA steering committee's site, particularly within the RSC site, you'll want to keep an eye on news and announcements and presentation pages. Those are good places to keep an eye on for new developments there. Nonofficial channels here for discussion among catalogers, you can check out RDAL or EDUCAT. As many of you I'm sure already do. Keep in mind neither of these are official channels for RDA news though. So that brings us to the second section here. Before we go over some of the major things students need to understand and I'll introduce them to those things, I want to quickly go over major changes that will affect how teachers and trainers use the tool kit and how they prepare their materials. Given the incorporation of the library reference model, there are a number of conceptual changes that teachers should be familiar with. I'm not able to go over them all in detail, but I wanted to bring to your attention some of the major things to look for, new entities, new terminology here.Some of this will cover today. But, again, our focus is really in teaching and not having to understand all of these concepts here. I do want to point your attention to relationships, though. We'll see this in a moment. Relationship designators have been reenvisioned as a type of element, relationship element. So we will talk about that today for sure. Application profiles, as I said, we're going to keep touching back on this topic as we go today. So something that's really important to note up front is that RDA's old core, core-if concept has been done away with. RDA as a result is more flexible now. But also as a result, it means you must rely more on supporting documentations to provide that level of prescription. So the post 3R RDA assumes the availability of application profiles and best practices documents to help us accomplish that kind of prescription. So we will revisit that momentarily. Overall, you can become more comfortable with the conceptual changes by working with the LRM, some of the LRM resources that we talked about. And also consulting some of the additional presentations and webinars that had been made available by the steering committee and by ALA. So not to gloss over the conceptual differences, we won't have time for all of them today. Something I do want to spend a lit time with here, though, is navigational changes. This is a big thing people react to when theyfirst see the version, the data version of the tool kit. So you notice right away that the layout is different. Gone are the vestiges of the linear document, it now resembles a data base much more closely. So it helps to think of RDA now as a data base that contains several different pages. Most of the kinds of pages are reflected across the top header so we can see entities, for example, there is a page in RDA now for each entity. And keep in mind that some entities now have super and sub relationships to each other, for example, a person is a sub entity of agent. The entitiesare also one way of accessing another important kind of page, the elementspages. We'll take a look at those in just a second. Entities and elementsare the entities that cover the descriptive guidance. The other pages are support documents. Guidance, pages that supply additional background information for key concepts. Some of the old chapter 0 stuff is in guidance. For example, policy pages are where we can expect to find policy pages such as the LCPCCS when these are ready, and resources is additional supporting documents. You find things lineback the glossary here, the -- like the glossary here,the vocabulary and coding schemes, old appendix matters like abbreviations. Those are all resource page types. So, the elementspages --
- 6. Elements all live at a specific entity level. So each element is associated with one specific entity. And you will find elementsenumerated at the bottom of each of their respected entity pages. So, for example here, you can see the list of elements that are associated with the work entity. And there are many. And by default, they're given to us in alphabetical order. So you can scroll down and browse through, or you can search within using the special find element box that is available on each entity page. Now, elements pages can also be retrieved by using RDA's general search function. So let's talk now about navigating the text via search. A search box is available on the tool kit. Searching gives access to policies, guidance pages, resource pages, glossary entries, and contributed documents. An awful the types of pages you can find in the data base, you can get to through the main search box. You'll have limits and search choices ahead of time, then you'll be given faceted limits that are available once you have your initial search results screen. Note that you cannot use -- in your search but you can phrase search using quotations, which is useful. Here you have seen, I've done a simple search for the word "spirits" and you can see that six results have been brought back. Six documents or pages, right? We have a couple of entries from the glossary. We have a couple of elements there.And some results from the relationship matrix. Now, you can also search by R fields and prior RDA instruction numbers. This is very helpful for those of us working alongside older training materials or working to update our teaching or training materials. So here,my old slides for doing authority work might have shown 9.14 are where instructions are on record language of a person. If I'm trying to find that in the new RDA tool kit, one way to accomplish that is just by searching 9.14 in the search box. When I do so, you'll see I get one result, it's an element page. That's the language of person element.So that I found useful for sure. There are multiple ways to navigate and usually multiple ways to find what you need. For instance, I want to see instructions on how to record a title proper. I probably already know this is going to be an element type page and I might even know this element lives in the manifestation entity level. So, first option is drilling down or browsing. I could actually go to the entities and pick out the manifestation. I can go down to the bottom where all of the elements are listed at the bottom and I can scroll through and find title proper there. More -- a little more quickly, perhaps, would be do a general all key word search for the term "title proper," from there,I could limit results to just element pages and then title proper will emerge at the top of the list. A third option -- I can use an exact title search and go directly there if I know the exact title of the page, if I'm confident about that, just do that, we'll bring you right there. Fourth option, my old teaching slides reference this as 2.3.2 on title proper. So I can put 2.3.2 in my search box and it will take me to title proper, or take me to the results page where I can see title proper. Finally, I could have been good and made a bookmark ahead of time. And if so, I can go to my bookmarks and pick out the bookmark for title proper. I'll show you how to do that in a moment here. It's part of RDA's updated functions. Some new and altered functions affect how we navigate the tool kit. Highlighting text will pop up the floating tool bar with four little icon, four functions. Instruction numbers are no longer used in this version of RDA. Many of these functions provide us in alternate ways to reference and find very specific passages. So I'm going to talk about the last two first, the left two icons here, the interlocked links, will give you an option to generate a URL that returnsyou to a specific spot indicated. Let me see. Yes. Okay. So, I can highlight that. Have the tool kit generate a URL that will take me back to where I just highlighted. So this could be useful for creating a navigational aid for yourself and your students and for sharing a reference to a particular passage.
- 7. Similarly, the hash tag icon or the sharp sign there will allow you to see and save a citation number. So, basically each header on each page is associated with a randomly generated citation number. As you're just scrolling along and reading, you will not see the citation numbers unless you use this function to actually call it out and view it. Once you have it, you can use it to very precisely reference and direct people to specific passages. Uh no, the first two icons help us save a bookmark or a note which is a bookmark with some associated text. Note that bookmarks and notes will not appear unless you have logged in twice. So the RDA tool kit beta site currently, you log in the first time, that's your institutional level. From there, you can start using the tool kit. But you can also log in to a second time to your own personal account. And doing so gives you access to all of the functions in their entirety. So, once you're logged in to your personal account, you can generate bookmarks or notes as I showed you before. You highlight a passage and choose those options. Once bookmarks and notes are created, you can find them under the bookmarks and notes header at the very top of the page. You can also organize these into folders. You'll see, I've created a folder for bibliographic cataloging and saved a note about carrier type. Yes, here. You can name it whatever you want. I named it carrier type. I chose to name it locally so my other institutions can see the bookmark, the note here. And you'll note I told people use this instruction to report carrier type. Don't forget to use the carrier type that controls vocabulary for carrier types. You can also share notes globally, I believe. So people from other institutions. It is possible for you to create a folder of notes pointing your students to each element that you want them to be aware of, so you could create a little folder and stuff it full of notes in the order that you'd like your students to go through. Honestly, I think it would be a bit cumbersome, there'sprobably better ways to do it. But that's one option you might want to consider. I think a better option for creating a more comprehensive list or guide for pages in RDA would be the -- to create a document. And, so, documents pages, these are things that you can create and they work similarly to how some of the work flow pages in the previous version of RDA worked. So, once you're logged in with your personal account, you're logged in the second time,you'll have documents available at the top header. You'll go to see your documents and also to create new ones. Document can be set to private, institutional, or local, I suppose, what it's called here, or global. You can construct your document using the word editor there at the bottom of the page. Veryuseful here I found was the URI panel in the middle of the screen. So, here, you can quickly generate URI's links for entity, element,and guidance pages. Then you can pop those down to the top -- text of the document below. So using the URIs, you can create an annotated work flow. You can pick all of the elements you want in a direct order, save them in the document, then someone needs to work through clicking on all of those. The teacher could create a cataloging exercise document here. If I were going to use functionality with RDA to guide my student, I would use documents rather than a folder of notes. But notes are possible as well. So, before we move on to thinking about student needs and a few other things I want to call your attention to as teachers before we move into discussing student needs here,specifically, there are some current realities that we as instructors need to take into account here. Using RDA now more than ever relies on best practices, documents, and fully fleshed out application profiles they're anticipating these will be available soon. But at the moment, the absence will make teaching, training, or using this version of RDA difficult. I'll have some advice on this a little later in the presentation.
- 8. Also to note, the beta tool kit seems skimpy on examples in places. This is something that's being addressed. Examples are being added all the time. We're seeing more and more of them soon. As with previous versions of RDA, there's major disconnect between the -- you know, prevalent cataloging software and tools and what's going on in RDA. This tends to reflect the difference between current bibliographic data bases and some of the environments that RDA assumes. I tend to use templates in teaching an intro course, so I don't get to specific software. But I have people catalog in an Excel template I'll show you in a moment. But sometimes I have students using CLC connection in more advanced courses. The Rinse tool might have an option for more academic exercises. I'll have more advice on software and tools later as well. Finally in general, some of what is in RDA is not possible in a MARC environment. It is, but it ends up in curtailed or combine in some ways. NOMENS, data about this entity appears in authority records for works, I suppose. So if you're thinking of students MARC as well, you need to be aware of this. If you're teaching students RDA and MARC, you are already aware of this. This is not a new thing here. There's always been a difference between some of what RDA posits conceptionally and what happens in MARC environments. There are a few other resources to consult. You can talk over what RDA can do. If somebody is using live function, check out a couple of presentations that are available freely on youtube getting the handle on the new RDA tool kit and there'sa beta site demo as well. So you can watch Jamie go through and create some of these documents and bookmarks and so on. And finally, the RDA tool kit beta site has its own help pages. A question mark, icon and help. And the help documentation covers in detail how these functions work and how a lot of search works and things like that. So check those out as well when you're in there. So what should our students know? How can we teach them this? There's more than we have time to get into here. I'm going to tryto hit major points related to two major learning objectives. The first understanding RDA and the RDA tool kit. And the second being able to apply RDA to actually create metadata. Depending on your setting, students may only need to understand the basics or they may need to be able to apply and use RDA. They might be able to use RDA independently by themselves. So it's worth noting some of the major differences among students in different settings. And note on this slide, I'm generalizing quite a bit, but it's a helpful starting point at least. The classroom environment, students who are learning about RDA as part of an academic class may have no prior related experience at all. Usually they are being taught RDA in order to understand the principles of metadata and resource description. So the core learning objective is learning the principles and RDA is a kind of a case study or an example that lets you illustrate that. The goal is not for them to become independent catalogers. Those who teach more advanced cataloging courses, our objective is to move them towards independence. Right? In contrast, work place students usually have experience. They're expected to be more autonomous. And they're usually learning about RDA in order to accomplish specific objectives. For example, I have a staff member who needs to catalog dissertations, you know. So this person needs to understand -- they have a specific learning objective. Sometimes we say that classroom students need to know the rules and work place students need to know the exceptions or complications, perhaps. That being said, we know that classroom students do love bringing up exceptions and actually addressing what are the scenarios in class could be a good way to go back to reebb forcing those principles as well. -- reinforcing those principles as well.
- 9. You will have to adjust it accordingly, work place students benefit from smaller, more focused lessons that are not necessarily useful in the formal classroom. So, there we go. Regardless of setting, I think students should understand the basic background on RDA first. As I mentioned, I always like students to interact with primary documents where possible. So usually I would have students reading and getting familiar with LRM before approaching the post 3R RDA. I use some of the resources that I mentioned earlier. As for the background on RDA itself, I used to assign chapters 0 through 1 as preliminary reading for students. Now I would assign specific pages from the guidance section of the beta tool kit including the introduction to the RDA page and all of the pages that it links to, the resource description page, the user task page, and so on. You can make a document containing links to all of the preliminary pages and share that document with students so they're reading through them in order. As far as RDA history goes, classroom students should understand RDA's history. This is a bit trickier at the moment as most historical reviews will end with the release of RDA in 2010,or, you know, the 2010 to 2013 era. So for now, I would supplement current readings on bibliographic description like a current event section and include news of the RDA tool kit, the RDA steering committee and so on. You may hunt your students down and share stories about current developments as well. One of the things that struck me most about the new tool kit is that the data base structure seems to decontextualize everything, right? Whether it was meaningful or not the linearity of the previous descriptive standards at least gave us a framework for understanding where things were in relation to each other. Under the data base approach of the new tool kit, learners and professionals need a way to draw a new mental map of the resource and how to think about it. So, as I mentioned before, one way is to think about the neutral kit as the data base of pages. These pages range from prescriptive pages, like entities and elements,to supportive pages like the vocabulary and coding schemes, guidance resource pages, and so on. Is pages are consistent enough in the tool kit that you can usually tellwhat type of page you're looking at. Whether you're looking at an element or a controlled vocabulary or an entity, and so on. You should note many catalogers will continue to use external support documents alongside RDA, application profiles soon, templates, local policy documents, and so on. So those sit externally to the tool kit, but will still be being used probably. So, let's take a look at some of the types of pages that students will need to be able to recognize and understand. Starting off with entitypages. Entities are the things that we are interested in describing. What things we're interested in describing come to us from the LRM. These don't all reflect tangible real world things, because some abstraction allows us to depict relationships that happen in the bibliographic universe that are of interest, multiple editions of something over time. All entitypages are set up to the start of the person entity page here. It begins with a definition and scope of the entityitself. The prerecording section answers the question, do I have the right entity? How is this entity described? Does it have anymore specific sub entitiesthat I could consider using instead. Following this is a recording section. Which answers what is the bare minimum description of this entity. And, again, required elementsare going to be really coming to you from application profiles, the bare minimum description is going to be prettybare for most thing, usually an abolation of some kind. Recording addresses how is this description recorded. Finally, there'sthe element section that we saw briefly before in relation to the work entity here is the list of elementsthat are associated with the person entity. The elements section answers the question, what elements are associated with this entity? Another way to think about this is which elementsfeatured this entity as a domain. So, address of person, the domain is person. This is an element that is used to describe person.
- 10. When catalogers work with RDA, they're usually doing so to describe a specific entity or set of entities, like a musical work or a new author, for example. Descriptions are created by accumulated statementsto describe the entity. Like title or date of birth. These call for a metadata description set that is the terminology used in the RDA tool kit beta here. In current work places, people might refer to these as records. Metadata description sets are known as elements, two types. There's a bit of my words here. But they're descriptive elements or what we call attribute elementswhat is it glossary will call them in RDA. These are elementsthat have no given range per se. Usually risk record like a specific text stream. So the address of person, for example, isn't really linking to another specific entity. Its domain is person. The range is undefined. It's just we're recording the address. In contrast, we have associative or relationship elements. We view them as a type of relationship now. Associative or relationship elementshave range which is another entity. So the element assistant to the domain as a person. This person is the assistant to and then the range is also a person. So it's a relationship element that connects one person entityto another person entity. So attribute have no range. There's an associative range which is another kind of entity. Note that currently the systems people use come wine several entities to one record -- combine several entities to one. The record for a book tends to contain expression, work manifestation entities. This might not always be the case. Linked data models used or follow one-to-one description representingone entity and the connections to others. Explain this is nothing new to those teaching RDA. Right? Even before there was a mismatch between the entities going on and what's happening in a lot of the people's bibliographic data bases. There will be more guidance of these implementation scenarios coming to the cool kit in the coming month. Stay tuned for more there. Where am I? Moving on to elements. Elements pages follow their own pattern. They're the metadata statements to describe certain entities. An address or person is an element that describes the entity. The pattern for the elementspages are as follows, we begin with a definition and scope, and then following this, it's a little blue box that appears only in the element pages, it's called element reference. And it offers some quick, at-a-glance information about the element. The IRI identifies the identifier in the registry which is another way to identify additional elements. It can be searched in the tool kit and in the RDA registry as well. Following this, domain. Domain tell us which type of entity it can describe. Here carrier type is an element that describes manifestations. If a range appear, it shows this element is meant to create a relationship between one entity of the domain and one of the range. Because we have no range here, we know this is an attribute element. Excuse me. We also have other label, alternate labels for this element,other names for it. And then we have labels or mappings to Dublin core and MARC21 as well. Following this, a prerecording section. This answers the question, is this the element I want and also provide further reference and information. Following this is a recording section. This answers the question of what data do I record. Note that conditions and options may begin appearing here. Basically, you would read through the recording section. If your situation matches the conditions stated, you may choose to invoke one or none of the options then listed. This section and the next, recording methods, are really where the actual instructions in RDA lie here. So, recording and recording methods are where you're going to find your descriptive guidance. Recording methods not pictures here up to four different methods may appear here unstructured, structured, identifier, and IRI. Now more information on this is available in its own dedicated webinar. So you might want to check that out if you want to know more there.
- 11. Note that most catalogers will choose their recording method based on precedent or local policy. Rarely, if ever, are all four suitable or even possible. You're not having to choose between all four everytime you look at an element. I did want to bring your attention to the RDA registry here. It is another source of information about elements, most useful here are the IRIs, which appear in the RDA tool kit now. There's much tighter integration between this version of RDA tool kit and the RDA registry. You might wish to have your students interact with the registry more if you're teaching about bibliographic data as blank data. There are term no logical resources between the two resources, classes in the RDA registry really equate to entities in the RDA tool kit. Properties equate to the elements. And values equate to the ask the value, vocabulary and coding schemes or controlled vocabularies. Speaking of which, talk about that type of page next. The certain elements, the prerecording section will prescribe a specific vocabulary that design values for the elements. These are the vocabulary and coding schemes. You can link to the BDS or choose one or more termsto the list as appropriate. You may be recording the labels or the IRI's, depending on your choice of recording meth. Here carrier type is telling us, the carrier type vocabulary and coding scheme is available. And so when we go to that, we'll see a list of all of the carrier types, both their labels and their IRIs as well as a brief description there. You can go through -- run into the BDS as you're using the elements, but you're looking at all of them together as we look at the resources in the new RDA tool kit or you can go to the RDA registry and under values and it will give you a list of all of the controlled vocabularies that RDA set up. These are not new to us. We would see them integrate in the text of RDA. Now they're called out and linked into a separate resource. But many times, they're functioning the same way they did before. Ultimately, the use of any particular vocabulary scheme is unto each institution. Some may choose to go to vocabularies outside of RDA. Some people might want to use DCMI type here. That's a decision that would be local and something that would appear in an application profile, for example. So, now that students understand what they're looking at, how do they begin to use it in practice? In terms of learning RDA to describe -- learning RDA -- learning to use RDA to describe entities, let's say that, we have a couple of different options as we did before. The first option, you can guide students through the creation of records using the LRM entities. So creating a work metadata description set and another metadata description sets and so on. If you are having students describe separate entities before, this is the approach for you. If you're doing this, you likely have your own templatesor you could use R -- RIMM, RIMMF4 data is what you 'been seeing. And many classroom instructors have opted for this route as well, myself included. If you're in this scenario, you recognize that current data bases use a different structure, bibliographic and authority records sometimes holding of items in their own thing. You teach students how to sit RDA data into bibliographic and authority records as needed. The good news is in either case, I don't think you need to start from scratch with your materials. I teach my introductory students using an Excel spread sheet. And in a moment, I will show you the post 3R makeover and how I've updated to align to the new tool kit. As I previously mentioned. The core concept has been done away with in order to facilitate greater flexibility for RDA and its data. As a result, the instructions themselves are less prescriptive here. Working with post3R RDA, teachers and students are metly confronted with which elementsdo we need. Going through the list one- by-one is not feasible. There are thousands of elements. Ultimately, this is where application profiles come in to play.
- 12. Application profiles are common in other metadata communities and offer a narrower interpretation of a standard for use by a specific community. If any of you have worked with Dublin Core, you probably had a local guide to using it at your institution telling you which elements to include and how to supply them with values. That's an application profile. That is what they do. And this is what theywill do when they're available for RDA. When application profiles are available, say, from Library of Congress, partners for cataloging, I will update my teaching materials accordingly. Now the best I've been able to do is modify what I've currently have and for me that was based on previous guidance, on the BIBCO standard record. It was an application profile anyway. We just didn't call it that. If you're curious as to what application profiles might look like, where is my little popup? There it is. So, Gordon Dunsire gives information there in his recent presentation. It's common for application profiles, you can see an example that he provided there.We have a table with a list of elements, a note whether it's mandatory, whether it's repeatable, if there'ssuggested vocabulary and coding scheme or instructional and coding scheme. And then of those four recording types, which method is preferred.There might be additional notes and so on. But any way, that gives you one idea of what the application profiles could look like, the form they'll take. Okay. So, I wanted to talk about my template here, which is kind of the core of my training material for introducing students to RDA. Specifically thinking of how to modify these kinds of materials. It doesn't actually take much. It should be easier once application profiles and policies are available. So, here's a look at the template that I currently use to teach RDA. So, here the elementswere chosen based on what we discuss in class and what I felt they might encounter during their exercise, which, in this case, was to catalog a single print monograph. Many other elementsexist not in the full template. You as the instructor or trainer are usually the one deciding what elementsthe students need to add to their repertoire. They follow along and fill in the value and the data column for each applicable element. They might need to delete a row, add one, or so on. I use MARC mappings as it helps in future lessons when we're learning about encoding but we don't deal with that at the same time we deal with RDA. It's just there for reference. So here is the template that I've now modified it to be alongside post RDA. I'll note I have the element's name listed, the URI. The students can copy and paste the element name or the URI and search them to the tool kit and they'll be taken to the exact page they need. They'll follow the URI to go to the registry for more information. The domain column tells us which type of LRM entity this data would be recorded and referenced to. And then the MARC column is still there to show us how to be recorded in a more traditional record. You can take this template, possibly, and throw it to a document in the tool kit and direct your students there. I tend to use it as a separate Excel file and in class we print out paper copies of this, do an exercise where they're just writing in the data, for example, that we do together.So, one word of caution here, there are new elementsand element name changes that are not going to exist in your old templates. I have made my sample template available, you will find a URI at the end. You can check it out if you like. Look at a copy to begin to modify it for your own uses. It's going to give more guidance on what we should be including in lessons. At the moment, mine is based on that BIBCO standard record. I refer to that template as the training wheels for my intro students. I think it's important to note the different students will interact with RDA differently depending on your goals for them. For students in an intro course on something like information organization, access, retrieval, the goal here is to learn more about principles. They use RDA as an example. Often during lecture time, I explain major elementsthat are -- they might need to know. We do an exercise together in class using that template. And the example monograph and they the get by here with class notes. They have an assignment to describe their own, monograph of their
- 13. choosing, theymay need to look up additional information in the tool kit. But a lot of them are relying on the notes that we've made together. For a more advanced class on cataloging, I still introduce them, two important elements. But the expectation is the students are going to become more comfortable looking up the information on the tool kit on their own. So I would expect the students in the advanced class going to the tool kit frequently and looking at the instructions, becoming more independent is an important goal there. And, of course, in work place training, independence is a goal for sure, right? You will want your trainees to interact with RDA tool kit regularly to be able to develop their own documents, notes, cheat sheets, and so on. And ultimately, your know, understand to assist in policy development as well, perhaps. Again, work place goals vary quite a bit depending on someone's role. That being said, I think it's a good time to transition to some of my overall recommendations here. And then we'll have plenty of time to talk during the Q&A session as well. I think one of the biggest things here that people are concerned about and thinking about is timing. So when should you introduce your students to the new version of the RDA tool kit? First, make a profile, play around with functions. Generate links, bookmarks, documents for yourself. As for students, keep in mind, we're waiting for the go-ahead from the RFIC that the beta tool kit is ready for prime time. And many libraries might continue to use the previous version of the RDA for sometime. As almost nobody will catalog this version of RDA just yet, if you're teaching the students for the semester,my advice is to continue to use the prior version of the tool kit. You should show the beta version of the tool kit and explain it to your students but I would be reluctant to apply hands on training in advance of any policy documents. Hopefully it will be different in the spring and we can train students using the new version and show the old version as reference. If you are a training practitioners or interns or so on, people who will be in work place settings, I think timing is a more local decision. Practitioners should start getting used to beta and checking out some of the training material on how post 3R-RDA differs. You should hold off on cataloging until an announcement and feel comfortable with application profiles and supporting documents, some of which you'll be developing on your own, keep in mind. I know that many of you already have lesson plans devised for introducing bibliographic description. I don't think you should change your overall approach. I'll give you a lesson plan for introductory students. This is for graduate students and covers organization, access, and retrieval. In most such classes, I usually have a three- week unit that deals specifically with bibliographic description. First week is more lecture and discussion based. Students do background reading on objectives of bibliographic description. They'll be introduced to LRM. We'll talk about current changes going on in the information environment. You'll spend some time discussing LRM before we do activities based on LRM activities. The second week is a more hands on flipped classroom approach. So as preparation, they will read the introductory matter to RDA, perhaps saved in a document now in the tool kit. And they read through some of my slides going over the most relevant and common elementsthey need to review. We review it in classtime and spend most of the time in small groups where students are using the template to record bibliographic data, for example. We go over the results, we talk about the implications for the data for access. Then it leads them to a solo assignment where they will complete a version of that template for another monograph for their using. We go over how the other entitiesare described. I do not teach intro students to create RDA data here, but rather the goal is to help them learn to read existing authority data in systems like LC and understand where it's coming from, the relation to RDA.
- 14. For more advanced students, you know, it's going to depend on the contents and the objectives for that particular course as well as how many weeks you have available. In the past, a typical 15-week course, I've had a five-week unit to cover bibliographic description. And the first week is basically largely the same as going on with the intro students. They'll read the entire LRM and not just portion of it. The second weekis similar to an intro course where they're doing an activity to describe bibliographic activities such as RDA, focusing on print monographs. We talk about access points and relationships and how these connect entities and enhance access. Fourth week, we bounce back to hands-on activity and work on describing other materials that are common in bibliographic settings. We look at sound recordings, video recordings, and e-books. The fifth week, how agent entities are described. We have a hands-on activity to re-create an RDA record or metadata description set for a person. The students learn how to read authority data. Typically, I have assignments, two or three assignments that come out of all of these weeks as well, where they're doing work independently. Usually for the entire unit, I'm having students use the template. In future units in the class, we deal with encoding. And at that point, I teach students how to use the CLC connection or another software, your choice of encoding and tool may vary, but I suggest teaching this independently from RDA if time allows. Finally, if you're training individuals, say a staff member or an intern, you have the liberty of crafting focused and individualized training. What does this person need to do. What are their goals, what are your goals for them. You start with background training and how post-3R RDA is different and how it impacts the work they're going to perform and go to specific practice from there. Group training is hard to predict. I've been able to survey trainees ahead of time to see what they're looking to learn more about. You can kind of adjust accordingly. You'll go over big differences and examining how the differences affect day-to-day work. It should be easier than the training for AACR2 to RDA was. But you can go back and look at the general approaches we used then. I know many catalogers are adept. Materials will be available soon. Keep an eye out for those. Only some of the things we talked about today will help you plan your own self-training program for now, though. You can continue to discuss and share the listservs as you do. I promised the access to the template. Nothing super fancy. You can see what my current teaching template looks like. I've gone through and updated the whole thing to reflect the new RDA tool kit data, as far as we know it right now. I anticipate that -- that I'll continue to update the file when you see more application profiles or policy and so on. This is a live link. You can check back later and see if you've changed it. You can feelfree to download a copy and modify it for your own uses or your own records, if you like. So, that -- yes? Okay. So that brings us to the end of the main talk here. And so we've made it through my material. And I'm eager to hear comments, questions, suggestions, that some of you might have, advice about teaching post-3R RDA as well. >> Colton: I'm checking back at the chat. I haven't seen any questions coming in over the course of the presentation. We'll give people a moment to process their questions. >> Brian: Give them a moment to digest. >> Colton: I want to remind everyone that we've been recording and within the day, you'll receive an e-mail. It will include a link to the archive and a link to the slides. So you'll have that as an additional resource. So let's give a minute here. Let'smake sure there aren't any questions coming to the chat. We do have over 20 minutes, so no question is too big. Feel free to ask. >> Brian: Thanks. I should say even if people don't have a question right now, you think of one later, you can feel free to contact me. You can see my e-mail is there on the final slide as well. If you'd like to discuss something or have any further questions, something just popped up, is that right?
- 15. >> Colton: It might have just gone private to you, Brian. >> Brian: Okay, yeah. So the question was what is -- what does 3R mean. Looks like someone has answered that, RDA, tool kit restructure and redesign. >> Colton: All right, thank you so much for that. All right, any other questions or comments? A question about the 3R project here, Brian, which I'm not sure you know the answer to. >> Brian: Sure, I cannot speak for the RDA steering committee. As far as I know, it is supposed to be finalized later this year. But I am not the best source of information on specifics for the timeline there. >> Colton: All right, thank you. Let'ssee. Do you have any idea about examples being added to the tool kit? >> Brian: Again, I'm not a great source of news. But I can tell you what I know from my understanding is that more and more examples are going to be added. Of course, recently, they hired a new examples editor right with the RDA tool kit. And I know they are working to add more examples. My guess is it would be one of those thing where is more examples will be in place before they announce this is a finalized version. So, from my own understanding, I would expect more examples to proliferate through RDA in the next few months. >> Colton: To your knowledge, will the BDS be the same as they were in the old tool kit? >> Brian: I have not gone through every single one of them. My initial impression in working with them is that they were largely the same, the big difference is they're kind of called out separately in their own kind of pages where before they were interspersed with instructions. So you can see them called out and formalized as the own controlled vocabularies. I don't think there'sanything like, you know, nothing struck me as being different from what was going on there before. Not looking through each one of them. You look through the ones that you know you use in teaching and see if there are any surprises there. For my own use, I have not done surprised. >> Colton: Thank you so much, Brian. We have a subscription question here. That should go to the folks at ALA for that. So feel free to contact them. And let's see. We did get a comment about this. So thanks for that. Let'ssee. So from a shell, since students will go to the world and encounter pre-3R records, what do you do to teach them about the differences and best practices in encountering them? >> Brian: That is a great question. Because we haven't had to do this yet, we'll see. But I will go back to what I did when we were switching from AACR2 to RDA which is -- whether it was a bigger shift or not, you know, people can decide for themselves. But, at one point, I was actually teaching students still a little bit of AACR2, just enough, so they can understand the records and why they were seeing them differently. I used to put up a sample record and show them here is what the resource described in AACR2 looked like. And here's what it described in RDA looks like. So you might be able to do that with pre-3R and post-3R treatments.I'm less likely to spend more time on that now than I did on the transition. It's important to note that students will see -- you see AACR1 records in data bases, right? They have to know when to understand when the record was create and under what rules and interpret it through that way, you know? That kind of raises an interesting question about cataloging literacy, catalog record literacy and making sure students understand what they're seeing. They just know, okay, this is created before post-3R. I know the instructions that the cataloger was using are slightly different. >> All right, thank you so much, Brian. Do you know if the RDA to MARC mapping tools continue to be available?
- 16. >> Brian: Yep, again, I'm not an official mouthpiece here. But I was told that these will be available for now. But they will be less prominent perhaps in the future. All I know is they are there now. So the RDA-to-MARC's mapping tool, I mean, so the -- the elements are mapped to specific MARC21 fields in each of the element pages. As far as the actual tool, I'm not sure what tool she was using before. I'd have to ask. Okay, we're getting lots of questions now. >> Colton: Yes, we have James Henneley on to help to answer that. >> Brian: Thank you. >> No problem. >>James: Brian, you're doing a great job. On the MARC mapping thing, what Brian showed you in the beta site is a temporary solution to the MARC mapping. We hope to develop what I call a robust mapping tool in the next year or so that would allow us to provide this tool out not only to MARC folks, but between folks and etc. And that they can then maintain their mapping in that tool we've been sharing with you. So that's something that is further development. But you're not going to see a map -- a flat map table like you've seen a current tool kit. We're looking for a better solution than that. >>Colton: All right, thank you so much. I'll get you back on mute for now. >> Brian: Thanks. >> Colton: Yes, thank you. So you have a question about -- do you think MARC encoding will make it difficult for the students to fully understand the LRM's architecture? >> Yes. It's part of the reality that we're in right now. So I don't think we're going to see fully MARC-encoded examples and RDA tool kit just as we don't see them now. We see them in policy statementsor not, I'm not sure that will continue to be the case. But, yeah, I mean part of the things that we have to explain as instructors that there is, you know, a disconnect between what LRM proposes and what, you know, the architecture that's actually going on in current systems, which a lot of them are a bibliographic file with bibliographic and authority records and a lot of them are being encoded in MARC. I lost the question. What was it? So difficult for them to fully understand. It's one of the things you have to explain to them is there are disconnects between theory and practice. That's currently a prominent example of one. >> Colton: All right, thank you so much. Post-3R has a clear delineation between things and strings. When teaching, how do you emphasize these to prepare resource description to a linked data environment? >> Brian: Okay. So this is something I've been thinking more about recently in termsof how I approach teaching. The -- the typically what I do is like an introductory course, students are introduced to research description early in the course. And we visit linked data separately as its own unit towards the end of the course. Once they understand the things about controlled vocabularies and indexing and more about index and retrieval. -- indexing and retrieval. I've been thinking about not using linked data in the future but interspersing it with a lot of different units so students are more comfortable with it. Certainly on a unit with linked data you can explain things versus strings in the units. And literals, I guess. So they could be introduced to that before you talk about resource description, which could help them understand some of the changes that are going on in the new RDA tool kit. At the moment, my current plan is to continue learning about resource description first and then learning about linked data principles a little bit later on. But you could try to intersperse those or even flop the order of those if you think that might help students.
- 17. >> All right, great. Thank you. We're having a lot of great comments and discussion in the chat here.So thank you for that. Let's see, Brian, someone is asking about spread sheet, about mapping RDA tools. And elements that you see that question? -- do you see that question? >> Brian: Could you read it for me? Oh >> Colton: Are you going to share the mapping tools, elements, URI, domain and MARC fields, I don't know if that's a document you have available? >> Brian: Oh, I don't see -- maybe they're talking about my teaching template I showed earlier? Are you going to share the spread sheet? Okay. Yes. There's a URI that I listed on slide 63 or something, access to the sample template. >> Colton: Brian, if you're still there,your mic shut off. >> Brian: Am I back? >> Colton: Yes, you're back. >> Brian: Okay. So this link will take you to a copy of the spread sheet. It's a shared -- freely shared spread sheet in my Google drive that anybody can access and download. Anybody who has the URL can access and download. So that's where we have a full copy of the spread sheet that I showed. >> Colton: We'll share a link to the slides in the follow-up e-mail. You will be able to access the link. You don't need to write it down right now. >> Brian: Don't write it down, yeah. >> Colton: Can you tell us how to explain the notion of range, see slide 4? Is this something that students have problems understanding? >> Brian: Okay. Can we go back to that slide? >> Yeah, I'll go back and bring us there. >> Brian: Okay, so, the notion of range -- so usually domain and range are like a little sentence. Now, it's for teaching students about linked data or RDF, it's a way to make a statement about something. And so you have the domain, the property, and the range, DRP, or DPR. Domains, D comes before R, so D is always the start of your sentence. D, domain, is the thing that you're talking about. It's the subject of the sentence. And then range is the object there.It's the end of your sentence. So if I say this person has this address, you know, so has address is our propertyhere, the person is my domain, whatever the value of the address is is the range. So, with the elementsin the RDA tool kit, every one of them has to have a domain, right? You have to be saying something about something. As far as the ranges go, ranges are left undefined in many cases in which we'll call a distributive or attribute element which means you can look whatever in there. It might be a free text, it might be an IRI or something. If the range is defined, it will be another RDA entity. So for example, an assistant to, the relationship that connects one person to the other one. Person is also the range. It's a sentence that says something about one person's relationship to another person. So, domain and range can be tricky. But it is important to know, especially if you're learning about linked data, if you're dealing with ontologies at all, domain and range get much more tricky than what's going on in
- 18. here in RDA. It's something that students can easily get confused by. But I usually use the analogy of a sentence to help them understand that. >> Colton: Thank you so much. I'm checking to make sure. I think that's the end of the questions. We'll give it one more minute so no one is furiously trying to type in. Are there any other final thoughts you wanted to wrap up with? >> Brian: I wanted to remind them if they have additional questions or things they want to talk to me about, you know, feel free to send me an e-mail. You've got my address right there. >> Colton: All right, thank you so much, Brian. We got a question -- everyone feel free to chime in on the chat space. Know we're working on a non-MARC ally or IOSs. >> Brian: I would love to know this too if anybody has further information. We are getting the comments there. >> Colton: Could support for any customer who asks immediately, interesting. >> Brian: All right. We'll give you a moment here to see if anybody wants to chime in with that. But this is the end of our questions so I think we can go ahead and wrap up here. So thanks again for the fantastic presentation. And thanks to all of you for the great questions and fantastic conversation happening in the chat. We really appreciate having you here and being a part of the discussion. So thank you so much. Brian, thank you, again, and I hope everybody has a wonderful rest of the day. >> Brian: Thank you. >> Colton: Thank you.