RDA Toolkit Release - April 12, 2016

A new release of RDA Toolkit was published on April 12, 2016. When there is a new release for RDA Toolkit, it is typically made on the second Tuesday of the month. Releases typically contain changes to content and metadata, enhancements to RDA Toolkit functionality, and fixes to existing bugs. You can subscribe to our RSS development feed to get notification of releases. The details of the April release follow.

Content Updates

The RDA Steering Committee (RSC) issued an update to the content of RDA: Resource Description and Access that was included in this release. The update contained approved proposals from the November 2015 JSC meeting. The details of the changes are available through the RDA Update History section found at the bottom of the RDA tab in RDA Toolkit. Those changes are also available in the “Sec final” versions of the proposals posted on the RSC web site. Initially this update appears only in the original English version of RDA; the update will be applied to the translations of RDA in subsequent releases. However, the April 2016 release included other revisions and fixes to the Finnish, French, German, and Spanish translations of RDA. The revisions to the French RDA brought the translation in line with the October 2014 release of the original RDA. Full details of French revisions for the April release are available at here. The release also included Fast Track changes to RDA. These minor changes and corrections are listed in RSC/Sec/2. The release also contained revisions and updates to the RDA: Element Set and MARC/RDA bibliographic mappings in English and French. The release included revisions to British Library Policy Statements (BL PS), Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements (LC-PCC PS), and Music Library Association Best Practices (MLA BP --details here). in response to the update changes as well as changes to policy statements from the Committee for Library Standards for the application of RDA in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, known as Anwendungsrichtlinien für den deutschsprachigen Raum (D-A-CH AWRs). A complete list of the revised LC-PCC PSs is available on the Library of Congress website. The April release saw the debut of policy statements from the National Library of Finland, these statements appear in the Resources tab under the title Suomalaisten kirjastojen linjaukset (SKL). The Help text was also updated.

Development Updates

There were three important development changes to the Toolkit in April. The numeric display of the publish date that appears at the bottom of each RDA page was dropped in favor of a presentation of the publication date fully spelled out in the language selected to view the Toolkit. A "Master Profile" feature was added to allow account administrators to set RDA Toolkit display preferences for all their staff. A full description of this feature is available here. Lastly "?" was added as an option for wildcard searching. The "*" had been the only wildcard option, but feedback from some users more familiar with the question mark as a wildcard prompted us to allow for both characters to work as a search wildcard.

Fixes

A number of typographical and site errors were fixed.