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As is now customary, the RDA Steering Committee (formerly the Joint Steering Committee) released updates to the RDA toolkit and instructions on April 12, 2016. The changes to the rules themselves consisted of minor and fast track changes such as correction of typos, clarification of language, and revisions to make terminology more consistent, as well as more substantive changes.

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As is now customary, the RDA Steering Committee (formerly the Joint Steering Committee) released updates to the RDA toolkit and instructions on April 12, 2016.

The changes to the rules themselves consisted of minor and fast track changes such as correction of typos, clarification of language, and revisions to make terminology more consistent, as well as more substantive changes. Of note are the addition of (and revision of rules related to) new elements, including "non-self-describing manifestation," "self-describing manifestation," "note on identifier for the manifestation," and several terms related to various artistic processes. The RSC also added alternatives to the instructions for recording names and numbering of musical works (and parts thereof), allowing for greater flexibility. When describing corporate bodies, Associated Institution is now core in certain cases where it would be helpful.

The British Library Policy Statements (BL PS), Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements (LC-PCC PS), and Music Library Association Best Practices (MLA BP) underwent some revisions this month, and this update marks the first inclusion of policy statements from the National Library of Finland, which are referred to as Suomalaisten kirjastojen linjaukset (SKL).

As usual, changes and updates were made to other language translations of RDA to better align them with the original English version.

This time the Toolkit interface itself got a few improvements as well, though nothing too startling.

For more information, please check out the RDA Toolkit blog post on the topic.

Written by

Lizzy Baus
Metadata Librarian, Macalester College

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