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I attended the 2014 North Carolina Serials Conference last week, with quite a crew from ZSR. Ellen has already discussed the all-conference sessions, so I think I’ll write a bit about the break-out sessions I attended. The update session on RDA had some bits of news that might be of interest to folks outside of cataloging: namely that OCLC has announced that General Material Designators (or GMDs) will remain in legacy records (that is, records cataloged according to AACR2 rules) through March 2016. GMDs are those notes in square brackets next to titles in the catalog that say what kind of resource it is (for example, [computer resource]). OCLC is planning to add certain RDA-related fields to their legacy records, including 33X fields that indicate carrier information, over the next few years. In addition to these announcements, Kurt Blythe from UNC-Chapel Hill shared some RDA-related changes to serials cataloging. It was pretty inside-baseball stuff (info on how to code provider neutral online records in the 040 field, how to use indicators in 588 fields, the fact that parallel titles are considered core in CONSER cataloging, etc.), but it was interesting and useful to me. The other speaker at the session, Christee Pascale discussed NCSU’s RDA implementation. She said that most of the RDA training they gave to staff focused on how RDA is different from AACR2. A lot of it boiled down to if you do X in AACR2, then you do Y in RDA. Pascale argued that this actually sold the staff short, because they didn’t look enough at the conceptual underpinnings of RDA, especially the FRBR model. She argued that staff really need to have a solid grasp on the FRBR entities and the relationships between these entities, and that this will become a much more important issue when we begin to make the transition from MARC to BIBFRAME.

The other break-out session I attended was a presentation by Virginia Bacon and Ginny Boyer of ECU, who described how ECU merged the discovery services of their main library, medical library and (unofficial) music library. It was a long process, with a lot of discussion, a lot of persuasion and a lot of compromise. Eventually, they consolidated their web presence into a unified catalog, as well as a unified ILLiad presence, a unified Book Recall feature, a unified Ask a Librarian function, and a single WorldCat Local instance. The process has involved a number of roll-out stages, and constant marketing efforts to re-brand the separate main and medical libraries into a single ECU Libraries brand.

One last thing, in recent years, the NC Serials Conference has started having an expo, with tables for sponsoring companies and organizations to pass out literature and talk to conference attendees. NASIG is a regular sponsor of the conference, and, as the current Vice President of NASIG, I got to represent our organization. It was kind of fun to talk to folks about the joys of membership in NASIG.