While there, I attended a variety of workshops which hopefully prepared me for upcoming changes in the library world and will help me to better provide services to library patrons. I'm going to limit this entry to three of the workshops I attended, and may write more about the others in the future.
RDA what's that?
This workshop focused on teaching library staff about RDA (Resource Description and Access), a new cataloguing standard.
Libraries currently adhere to AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition) for cataloguing. AACR2 tells library staff exactly how to record information about books and other library materials in a standardized manner. In short, it's the foundation that the library's catalogue is built on.
One of the shortcomings of AACR2 is that it was created to help librarians to catalogue books, and has been adapted to help catalogue other materials. As a result, AACR2's primary focus is the form of the format of an item. That means that the book and audiobook for a particular title (say, J.R.R Tolkien's Fellowship of the Rings) are treated differently.
RDA (Resource Description and Access), the successor to AACR2 focuses more on cataloguing the work (Fellowship of the Rings) and keeping it separate from the work's container (book/audiobook/video/etc.) The only real difference to library patrons is that RDA should help the same work be lumped together in catalogues and be presented as a single entity.
If you search most library catalogues for "Fellowship of the Rings", you'll get a list like this:
Angled brackets are notes I've written to explain the entries.
Fellowship of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) [audiobook]
Fellowship of the Rings (Peter Jackson) [video recording]
Fellowship of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) [video recording]
Fellowship of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) [text]
Fellowship of the Rings (Peter Jackson) [text]
In a RDA-based catalogue, a similar search will look more like this:
Fellowship of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Fellowship of the Rings (Peter Jackson)
and users will click on the work they're searching for to see the specifics.
DIY accessibility
We're all familiar with the idea of accesibility. It's easy to think of things that increase accessibility in the physical world: ramps, signs with internationally recognized signals, etc. In the digital world, what constitutes accessibility isn't quite so clear. Arguably, the biggest challenge is to blind users who cannot see what is displayed on computer monitors.
This workshop had two main purposes. First, the presenters showed us programs that are available to increase accessibility. Screen readers are one such program. These programs read the text on the screen out loud so blind or other visually impaired users can use computers. Second, the presenters taught us how to make documents that are compatible with accessibility programs.
Making a document attractive and readable to a visually impaired patron and a sighted patron are two different things. An accessible document uses the built-in heading levels available in word processing programs. Other ways of denoting headings (different fonts, or using italics) do not cooperate so well with screen reading programs. Accessible documents as a rule do not contain tables, because they also cause problems for screen readers.
At the moment, most of the documents I create at work are for internal use only. Accessibility isn't a large concern for those documents. But if I can get into the habit of making all my documents accessible, it should serve me well in the future.
Yoga
I had hoped this session would be about little things I could do during the work day to relieve stress. I was wrong, and I ended up in pain. The presenter (a certified fusion workout instructor) worked our butts off and proved one thing: I am completely out of shape.
