Presented at ALA Chicago at the 25th Annual meeting of the Authority Control Interest Group, July 11, 2009. Discusses the process of registering the RDA Vocabularies and some problems encountered.

1. Registering the RDA Vocabularies Diane I. Hillmann Information Institute of Syracuse/ Metadata Management Associates Metadata.maven@gmail.com

3. Discoverability

4. Change notification

5. Potential for broader participation by the community

6. For vocabulary owners:

7. Versioning and change management

8. Notifications for users and maintainers

10. Established the DCMI/RDA Task Group (chaired by me and Gordon Dunsire of the University of Strathclyde)

11. It was agreed at the meeting that the TG would build the formal representation of the elements and vocabularies and set up an Application Profile

13. We started the registration process while the text was still in flux and the only version of the vocabularies was on a spreadsheet

14. Technology

15. The Registry had only recently implemented registration of element sets when we started on the element vocabularies

16. Standards and conventions

19. Some flip-flopped several times (“Title of Work” vs “Title of the Work” holds the record)

20. We were often the last ones to see the revised texts, and our needs to know specifically what had changed were too often ignored (making our quality control processes far more difficult)

22. The need to create relationships between RDA to FRBR stretched our creativity and knowledge (particularly of RDF vocabulary standards)

23. We caught a lot of our own mistakes on the second and third pass

25. Status of all RDA registered elements and concepts are now “New—Proposed” but will change to “Published” prior to RDA release

27. Supporting these two disparate standards has required extra care in building the vocabularies and relationships

29. Wanted to create a “bridge” between XML and RDF to support innovation in the library community as a whole, not just those at the cutting edge or the trailing edge

30. Although IFLA had agreed in principle that the FRBR entities would be registered with an IFLA domain, that still hasn’t happened

31. Problems with the IFLA website upgrade and issues around domain choices have delayed FRBR registration

33. http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/appendix_roles.shtml

34. This work provided a template for the registration of the role terms in RDA (in Appendix I)

36. More specific properties 7/13/09 13 ALA Annual: Linked Data Program

37. 7/13/09 14 ALA Annual: Linked Data Program Source vocabulary Specific property

39. Inconsistency in techniques for relating RDA Elements and FRBR entities add to the complication of the schema

41. Because elements are specifically related to (generally) one FRBR entity, specialized communities with a different view of of their (and their user’s) needs have no alternative than to create different elements

43. Elements related to more than one FRBR entity

44. Relationships in Appendix J actually include the name of the FRBR entity in the name and have separate definitions

45. Other elements and sub-elements appear multiple times in the text and ERDs with no indication that they might be repeated elsewhere (with the same definition)

47. Assumed aggregation of Place, Name and Date are obvious leftovers from catalog cards, and are not necessary to enable indexing or display of those elements together if libraries want to do that

48. Our concern was that such restrictions would create problems for reuse of RDA elements

50. Discussion functionality, down to the element or concept level, will be available by fall

51. Basic Description Set Profiles are in the building phase, will be available by RDA release

53. The RDA Elements and Vocabularies provide the basis for migrating from MARC to something that the broader information community can understand and interpret