New Representatives Appointed to the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC)

Two new members have been appointed by their constituencies to the JSC: Gordon Dunsire and Bill Leonard. Gordon represents CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals); the CILIP position in the JSC had been vacant this past year. Bill represents the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing; he is the successor to Marg Stewart, a long-time member of the JSC and former JSC Secretary, who recently retired from Library and Archives Canada.

More information about the two new members is given below. Contact information for them is available at the JSC members listing.

Gordon is an independent consultant and former Head of the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde. He has been a member of the CILIP-BL Committee on RDA since 2003, and of the RDA Outreach Group since 2005. He has contributed to several important meetings for the development of RDA, including the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR, Toronto, 1997, the RDA/ONIX workshop, London, 2005, and the Data Model meeting on RDA and Semantic Web communities, London, 2007. Users of the RDA/ONIX Framework for Resource Categorization will know Gordon as the facilitator for its development. He is particularly well-known in Scotland as a member of the committee of the Cataloguing and Indexing Group in Scotland, and as E-Services Officer of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland.

Recently he has been involved in the development of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) and Functional Requirements (FR) family of models maintained by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), as well as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. He was also a co-author of the final report of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group.

Currently Gordon is contributing to the revision of alignments between ISBD and RDA, and researching and developing Semantic Web mappings between major bibliographic schemas and vocabularies, including RDA, ISBD, the FR models, MARC 21, UNIMARC, and Dublin Core. He continues to give presentations to international conferences and contribute papers to professional journals on topics associated with cataloguing standards, universal bibliographic control, and linked data.

Bill Leonard graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1990. His first position was as a government documents cataloguer at the National Library of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada). Bill left NLC to pursue an archivist position in his hometown of Calgary after which he returned to Ottawa to work at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information as a cataloguer, system librarian, and team leader.

Bill rejoined Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in 2002 as an Information Standards Specialist which marked the beginning of his significant involvement with national and international standards development. Bill has contributed to the development and maintenance of ISO TC46 standards and is the Chair of the Canadian mirror committee for ISO TC46. In addition, Bill is LAC's representative to the MARC Advisory Committee as well as to the Canadian Committee on MARC. As a member of the RDA/MARC Working Group, Bill participated in the activity to revise MARC 21 to accommodate RDA and he will continue to act as the liaison to the MARC community on RDA-related issues.

Bill is very well-known within the Canadian cataloguing community and was welcomed by the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing as its representative to the JSC.

Date posted: 18 October 2012

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