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New Release of RDA Toolkit and RDA Registry

RDA Toolkit Release

The March 2022 release is the first since migration of the RDA Toolkit to new servers in January 2022. It includes updates to policy statements from the Library of Congress - Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the British Library and Music Library Association Best Practices. This release also includes significant additions and changes to RDA content. Following RSC approval of two substantive proposals:

  • 69 new elements were added
  • 2 new vocabulary encoding schemes were added (collection accrual method and collection accrual policy)
  • 58 elements were deprecated
  • 35 element labels were changed.

In addition, shortcut and soft-deprecation text was added to a number of elements. There are some adjusted definitions, new terms in the Glossary, changes in the LRM alignment, and changes to element hierarchies (broader and narrower elements). For specific information on these changes, see RSC/TechnicalWG/2020/1/RSCDecisions/rev and RSC/TechnicalWG/2020/2/RSCDecisions/rev.

Some formatting changes were also made in this release, including the addition of tables of contents for guidance chapters and clearer formatting for minimum description requirements. In Community Resources, a standardized paragraph was added to each of the “Terms in specific languages” pages to give fuller context. As usual, there were typos and markup fixes not documented in the Release Notes that were corrected in this release; thank you to those users who provided feedback.

As noted above, the implementation of the two RSC proposals in this release impacted hundreds of entities and elements. The elements that have been introduced and deprecated, as well as those that have been revised in some significant way, are listed in Addendum to the March 2022 Release Notes.

RDA Registry Release

In parallel with this Toolkit release, the RDA Registry also announces a new release of an updated interface with a cleaner look, improved navigation, and a more streamlined infrastructure.

Users will be interested to know that this release of the Registry:

  • Improves responsive design for display on tablets and smartphones
  • Improves the interface for translations of RDA Reference, with table details and prompts in the selected language
  • Improves site navigation
  • Improves support for screenreader software
  • Re-synchronizes the Registry with RDA Toolkit, including the recent development of collection-level description in RDA.

Developers will be interested to know that this release of the Registry:

  • Implements the RDA Reference data provenance/metadata schema implemented by the RDA Development Team in 2021
  • Uses the latest versions of Cascading Style Sheet and Javascript libraries, including Bootstrap 5, JQuery 3, and DataTables
  • Replaces previous mix of scripts and templates with a single script for element sets and value vocabularies.