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I attended the 2019 NCLA Conference in October, and I’m a little late in writing my blog post about it. By writing my post late, I’m finding that most of the sessions I attended have been ably covered by my colleagues, so I’ll try to hit ones that weren’t already discussed.

I went to a session on the coming changes to RDA by Dr. Sonia Archer-Capuzzo of UNC-Greensboro. She discussed how RDA has been reworked to accommodate the new FRBR LRM (Library Reference Model), which was adopted in 2017. As part of the process of revising RDA, the RDA Toolkit has been frozen for the past two years, but a Beta version of the toolkit that is still in development is currently available. The Beta Toolkit will be finalized in January 2020. During 2020, the Library of Congress, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and other big cataloging institutions will develop and document best practices for the revised code. In 2021, the old RDA Toolkit will go away. The new Toolkit will have a new organization, and will no longer rely on instruction numbers. Instead the rules will be organized by entities (as described by FRBR LRM). There will also no longer be links from RDA to AACR2 for comparison. Some new concepts and entities will be included such as Nomen and Time Period. Also, fictitious, legendary or non-human entities will no longer be treated as people for authority purposes. They will be assumed to be pseudonyms of a person. Because of the large scale changes to the RDA Toolkit, Archer-Capuzzo recommended that libraries print out the entire current RDA Toolkit before it goes away, but that strikes me as rather excessive.

In addition to attending sessions, I also did a presentation at the conference with Meghan Webb on the ZSR Graphic Novels & Comic Book collection and the Graphic Novels Reading Club. I described the origins of the collection, the kinds of things we collect, and how I catalog them. Meghan described developing the Graphic Novels Reading Club, how to recruit members, and the types of conversations we have at the meetings. She also talked about how she was able to get money from the Student Activities Fee in order to buy copies of graphic novels for the student attendees to read. The session was well attended, we got a number of good questions, and we even had a few people stay after the session to talk with us. Presenting in public usually fills me with dread, but this was alright.