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RDA in Europe

The interim UK community representation has merged with the DNB community representation to form a single interim Europe Region representation on the RDA Steering Committee.

Renate Behrens remains on the committee as the representative of the Interim Europe Region. Alan Danskin, the representative of the former UK community, has stepped down from the committee.

The RSC thanks Alan for his work on the development of RDA. He is the current chair of the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) that will transition into the Europe Region; so, he will continue to make a significant contribution.

These arrangements for the transition were agreed at the 2016 EURIG Seminar and Members' Meeting that took place on 23-25 May 2016 in Riga, Latvia.

The RSC Chair attended the EURIG meeting and participated in the accompanying Rigathon, an RDA hackathon hosted by the National Library of Latvia that focused on Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga. This was a stop on an "RDA tour of Europe" undertaken by the Chair and other members of the RDA Development Team in April-May 2016. Other stops hosted by national institutions included Madrid (Biblioteca Nacional de España), France (Bibliothèque national de France), and Stockholm (The National Library of Sweden/Kungl. biblioteket), ending in Florence with a development meeting hosted by Casalini Libri.

The RSC Chair gave presentations to invited and open audiences on RDA development activities and plans. The presentations are freely available in a variety of formats.

Several "jane-athon" hackathons were held in association with the tour, with over 150 librarians from more than 10 countries using RIMMF, the RDA data editor, to create rballs of RDA linked data that focused on Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (on the 400th anniversary of his death), Selma Lagerlöf, George Sand, and Jules Verne. The data are freely available, along with photographs and links to training materials and outcomes.

Two additional rballs were created as part of the "RDA – An Opportunity for Library and Archive Collaboration" project in Sweden, that focused on GAN (Gösta Adrian-Nilsson) and Sara Lidman.

Reports on these and other RDA activities in Europe are available in the IFLA Metadata Newsletter.

Future planned activities in Europe include a jane-athon on Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker) that will take place in September 2016 as part of a seminar on standardisation at Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands, organized by the Dutch RDA committee.

The RDA Steering Committee will meet in Frankfurt in November 2016, preceded by a seminar on RDA and subjects. Further information will be made available in due course.

Posted: 10 August 2016