In March 2012 the
Library of Congress announced that it would fully implement RDA cataloging by the end of March 2013.
Library and Archives Canada fully implemented the standard in September 2013.
British Library,
National Library of Australia, and
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and other national libraries have since implemented RDA .
Opposition In the United States, the cataloguing community expressed reservations about the new standard in regard to both the
business case for RDA in a depressed economy and the value of the standard's stated goals.
Michael Gorman, one of the authors of AACR2, was particularly vocal in expression of his opposition to the new guidelines, claiming that RDA was poorly written and organized, and that the plan for RDA unnecessarily abandoned established cataloging practices. Others felt that RDA was too rooted in past practices and therefore was not a vision for the future. In response to these concerns, the three
United States national libraries (Library of Congress,
National Library of Medicine, and the
National Agricultural Library) organized a nationwide test of the new standard. On 13 June 2011, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine released the results of their testing. The test found that RDA to some degree met most of the goals that the JSC (Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA) put forth for the new code and failed to meet a few of those goals. The Coordinating Committee admitted that they "wrestled with articulating a business case for implementing RDA", nevertheless the report recommended that RDA be adopted by the three national libraries, contingent on several improvements being made. Several other institutions were involved in the RDA test. Many of these institutions documented their findings in a special issue of
Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. ==See also==