Christopher Holden Begins Term as Technical Team Liaison Officer
At its January Meeting, the RSC was pleased to officially welcome its new Technical Team Liaison Officer, Christopher Holden. This role is always selected from amongst the members of the Technical Working Group, and serves concurrently as RSC Technical Working Group Chair.
As well as voting on RSC Proposals and Discussion Papers, the Technical Team Liaison Officer is the first port-of-call for other Working Group chairs, as he provides a sense and possibility check for anything proposed to the RSC - i.e. he advises Working Groups and the RSC on whether what they would like to achieve is technologically feasible.
The Technical Team Liaison Officer is a member of the RSC Executive Group and works closely with the Director of ALA Digital Reference, James Hennelly, including producing and publishing updates to the RDA Registry. Developers often contact techo@rdatoolkit.org with queries about using the RDA Vocabularies and with other requests.
It's an important role, and Chris has been shadowing Damian Iseminger during the last six months of his term of office. He is also very grateful that Damian is staying on as Past Chair for the next six months, to provide any support and answer any questions. As announced at the RSC Public Session on 23 January, Damian will be staying around for a while yet - he has no plans to leave the Technical Working Group when his term as Past Chair ends. Indeed, the Technical Working Group has a good track record for longevity of service to RDA - former Technical Working Group Chair and former RSC Chair Gordon Dunsire is still an active member of the Technical Working Group.
As Chris said in his first update to observers at the January Public Session, the Technical Working Group is open to new members, and is a great way to get involved with standards development. If you are interested, do get in touch with him.
In his day job, Chris is part of the Music Division at the Library of Congress and is well-known to music cataloguers internationally as the current chair of the Cataloguing Section of IAML (The International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres).
RSC Chair Renate Behrens said, "We are very grateful to Damian Iseminger for all he has done and all he continues to do within the Technical Working Group, and we are delighted to welcome Christopher Holden as our new Technical Team Liaison Officer and Technical Working Group Chair. It was a pleasure to get to know him at the November Meeting of the RSC and already he is contributing to the development of RDA and publishing the Registry. Welcome, Chris."
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Image: Damian Iseminger (left) and Christopher Holden (right) at the RSC Meeting in November 2024 (which Christopher attended as a special observer).