April 2021 RDA Toolkit Release

The April 2021 release of RDA Toolkit was published on April 6th. It includes the addition of more policy statements from the Library of Congress - Program for Cooperative Cataloging and the British Library and introduces a small number of Best Practices for the Music Library Association. There are also fixes and minor improvements to existing Toolkit functionality, including the introduction of blue highlight in the yellow Condition boxes to improve visibility.

The most significant change to the Toolkit in this release is the addition of the Community Refinements section of the Community Resources area. In the Community Refinements section are fourteen "pseudo-elements" that have been re-located from base RDA entities. "Pseudo-elements" are not a part of RDA Reference and thus are not really RDA elements (hence "pseudo"). They mainly relate to specific original Toolkit instructions for legal works, musical works, official communications, and religious works. As such, they are legacy instructions from the Anglo-American community and the RSC made a commitment to retain them in the Toolkit for use by that community. However, the RSC agreed that content related to specific communities should be removed from the base RDA instructions and placed in the Community resources area of the Toolkit.