Kickoff Announcement

In 2017 the Co-Publishers of RDA and RDA Toolkit will undertake a major project to enhance the RDA Toolkit website so that it can better meet the needs of its users and play a more productive role in their work. The Toolkit debuted in 2010 and by any standard practice it is time for a site redesign to adjust to changes to the online environment. However, the project, known as the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project, will go beyond changing the look and feel of the site and seek to add greater flexibility and utility to the Toolkit's display of instructions and RDA-related documents. The restructure portion of the project will involve a major rebuild of the instruction repository in order to bring it in line with current data management best practices, make RDA data more modular and dynamic, and allow the RSC to track and manage a greater range of metadata associated with the instructions. The restructure of this data is closely tied to the glossary synchronization platform that was rolled out this past August. The restructure will also include upgrades to the editing and translation tools. We will also explore new solutions for tracking the history of revisions and mapping of RDA to other encodings. The redesign portion of the project will include adoption of a responsive design and a plan to bring the site in compliance with established accessibility standards. We will also investigate improvements to toolkit navigation, display, and features with the goal of creating a user experience that is more intrinsically of the web. A new entity-based view of the instructions will replace the current Element Set view, and the Workflow HTML editor will be updated and improved. Initial planning for this project began in more than a year ago, but the project began earnest this past Spring with planning discussions involving ALA Publishing (on behalf of the Co-Publishers), the RDA Steering Committee, Board, and Development Team, and contracted developers of the Toolkit. The project will begin in earnest in April 2017 with a major restructuring to the RDA data repository and hopefully conclude in April 2018 with the roll out of the revamped site. We will provide regular updates to RDA Toolkit users here and on RDA-L about our plans and progress through out the project

Collecting User Stories

This Summer we formed a small user group to supply us with "user stories" that will inform our project goals and the group will also provide testing and feedback on the project at every step. This group consists of catalogers and cataloging instructors from national libraries, academic libraries and public libraries. It also includes several members from non-English speaking communities. While ALA Publishing will rely primarily on our user group for input, as well as guidance from RDA Toolkit contributors (editors, translators, etc.), we welcome all thoughts from the Toolkit user community. Feel free to fill out a User Story Submission Form and return it to rdatoolkit@ala.org with subject "3R User Story". We will collect User stories from now to the end of the calendar year.