RLS-athon in Edinburgh Follows Maurice Dance in Wellington

The RLS-athon, focusing on Robert Louis Stevenson and his works, is the latest Jane-athon. It was held November 9, 2015 at Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation in Edinburgh, Scotland, following the JSC meeting. The event was organized by the Cataloguing and Indexing Group Scotland in collaboration with the JSC.

Over 40 people from Denmark, England, France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and the U.S., including several members of the JSC, attended the day-long event. Most attendees used RIMMF (RDA in Many Metadata Formats) to create descriptions and establish relationships for the novels Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, and other works. One of the groups focused on rare materials as an extension of the November 6 international seminar on RDA and rare materials, while another discussed RDA and the requirements of national libraries.

The RLs base r-ball for Stevenson’s novels and non-fiction was augmented during the day by the addition of 140 entities, including the book sculpture of Treasure Island found during Book Week Scotland in 2012.

A new aspect at this event was a set of short presentations showing how RDA and RIMMF were being used at the National Library of Scotland to improve legacy data in existing systems.

The Edinburgh event was preceded by the Maurice Dance, another successful Jane-athon focusing on Maurice Gee and his works, held October 16, 2015 at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington. This event was of a similar size, and honored by an introduction by the National Librarian.

Both events have provided valuable feedback to the RDA Steering Committee and the RDA Development Team – and once again the participants had fun doing so, judging by the photographs.

The next Jane-athon will be the Boston Thing-athon at Harvard University on January 7, 2016. (See information at http://www.rdatoolkit.org/blog/7775)

More information, including downloads of RIMMF and RDF r-balls, photographs, presentations, and reports is available:

RLS-athon: http://rballs.info/topics/p/rls/rlsathon1/
Maurice Dance: http://rballs.info/topics/p/gee/mdance1/

Posted: 26 November 2015