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Today, Erik, Carolyn, Lauren C, Derrik, Alan Keely, Leslie McCall, Steve Kelly, Beth Tedford, Mark McKone, Linda Ziglar, Jean-Paul and Chris B. attended the first of a two part NISO seminar on RDA. The webinar gave a good overview of FRBR and how RDA facilitates the creation of records following the FRBR metadata model.

Rorbert Maxwell did the first part of the session. He did a good job of reviewing the FRBR model and in discussing where RDA standard was relevant. After a tour of what types of searching this approach would enable the presenter said that the next stepss are to implement RDA, design and ER database structure, and figure out how to handle legacy MARC data.

The second part of the session was by John espley at VTLS who covered some of these ‘next steps’ at a high level. He covered some various data modesl including flat file, ER models, and linked MARC records. I was curious to see that he did not discuss object databases or tripple stores as an option. He showed a sample FRBR ER diagram to illustrate how a database model would work.

John talked at length about the role of metadata encoding models and made the assertion that a common encoding model was not a necessary feature of next-generation systems. He asserted rather that interoperability between systems would be based on appropriate encoding crosswalk methods. John indicated that some areas of development included added ability to use Macros, easy access to the RDA toolkit, and more sophisticated workforms.