What's New with the Beta Site

This week a new release was published to the RDA Toolkit beta site. The release included a wide range of changes to RDA content--corrections to typos and format issues, edits for consistency and clarity, as well as additions of new or further developed text. This release builds upon the August release and includes several improvements on the site functionality, but the beta site remains under development and not authorized for use in cataloging work. 

Of particular note in this release is the change to the MARC 21 mapping. The number of mappings has increased from approximately 5,000 to 24,000, and the MARC 21 mappings will continue to grow. The mappings have been separated into Authority and Bibliographic lists, and numeric order has been restored (see images below). In addition to the improved MARC display, mapping for Dublin Core Terms was added with this release. Further mapping of Dublin Core will continue, and expectations are that more schemes will be mapped in the future. 

You can learn more about the MARC mappings and the beta site on the new RDA Toolkit YouTube channel at youtube.com/c/RDAToolkitVideo. This new feature includes videos of presentations by RDA Steering Committee and RDA Board members and other experts, as well as toolkit training videos for the new beta site. In the future we expect to add videos addressing key RDA cataloging issues from experts.