Jane-athon Success Continues

Following the success of the first Jane-athon in Chicago in January 2015, similar events have taken place, or are scheduled to take place, around the world in San Francisco and Boston (USA), London (England), Wellington (New Zealand), and Edinburgh (Scotland). “Jane-athon” has become a generic term for these events.

The second full Jane-athon was on June 26, 2015 at ALA Annual in San Francisco, USA. “The Jane-in: the summer of linked data” was attended by some 60 cataloguers and developers, with coaching and team leadership supplied by a who’s who of RDA expertise. Building on the curated r-ball from the first Jane-athon, delegates imported nearly 200 MARC 21 records to add 400 new entities to the RIMMF (RDA in Many Metadata Formats) metadata on Jane Austen and her works.

The next U.S. Jane-athon will be the Thing-athon, to be held on January 7, 2016 at Harvard University, Boston, MA. Registration is now open for this event, which will focus on academic and scholarly works rather than a single author or work. It will explore RDA in relation to special topics including institutional repositories, rare materials, matching strings to identify things, and digitization. See the announcement on Thing-athon: strings and things in RDA and linked data for further details and registration.

Meanwhile, the London Ag-athon, focusing on Agatha Christie and her works, took place in May 2015 at University College London, and the Maurice Dance, focusing on Maurice Gee and his works, was held on October 16, 2015 at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

The RLS-athon, focusing on Robert Louis Stevenson and his works, will be on November 9, 2015 in Edinburgh, Scotland, following the JSC meeting. Registration will close soon.

Plans are underway for an event in Madrid, Spain, and an event for law librarians in the USA. If you want to host a Jane-athon, please contact the Chair of the RDA Development Team, James Hennelly or the Chair of JSC, Gordon Dunsire.

Pure RDA data in RIMMF and RDF linked data formats are now available as r-balls for the creators Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Maurice Gee, Jim Henson, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and for the works Blade Runner and The Master of Ballantrae. The data for Jim Henson was created by Kathy Glennan, ALA representative to JSC, based on holdings of The Jim Henson Works at the University of Maryland.

For further information and free downloads of RIMMF and RDA as linked data, see the RDA Registry at http://www.rdaregistry.info/

For further information about the Jane-athons, and free downloads of RIMMF and RDF data to use with RIMMF, see the R-balls website at http://rballs.info/

Date posted: 20 October 2015