RSC October Meeting in Vienna

Renate Behrens, RSC Chair, and James Hennelly, Director of ALA Digital Reference, are delighted to announce the acceptance of an invitation from Vienna to host the RSC Meeting in October 2023.

The Austrian Library Network and Service Ltd. (OBVSG) is the service and operational management facility of the Austrian Library Network (OBV), a cataloguing and services consortium. It is the largest network of academic and administrative libraries in Austria with 70 participants, representing more than 90 individual institutions - including the Austrian National Library, university libraries, the colleges of education, individual ministries, numerous technical colleges and other important collections. Consistent metadata is the necessary precondition in order to provide library services and enable the discovery of resources. Therefore, RDA was implemented in 2015 and the consortium has been interested and involved in its development ever since.

Vienna is an ideal place for the RSC to meet, providing excellent links to and from many parts of Eastern Europe, where the RDA community is growing. 2023 is also an ideal time for the RSC to meet in Austria, since the DACH region will be the first to implement Official RDA this year.

Renate Behrens said, "There is always an outreach and training event as part of the RSC's way to thank our hosts. With the DACH implementation of Official RDA, this is a great time to come to Vienna, providing a real opportunity for rich, two-way dialogue and learning between our colleagues in DACH and the RSC." She also spoke warmly of the success of EURIG 2014, which was hosted by OBVSG.

As we finalise plans, there will be further announcements here of opportunities to observe the public session of the RSC and to attend a learning event with speakers from the RSC and DACH region. As Austrian information professionals already know, events at OBVSG are hybrid, and so online will be an option.

Mag. Hamedinger, managing director of OBVSG, said: "It is a great honour for OBVSG and OBV that our invitation was accepted. Metadata and the standards to sustain its international interoperability are vital to our consortium. Hosting this year’s meeting gives us the opportunity to support the work of the RSC and the wider RDA community. We look forward to welcoming RSC members as well as interested observers to Vienna."

Image by Jörg Peter from Pixabay