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There is a wonderful reflexive Italian verb, barcamenarsi, which, as with many words in that rich language has various shades of meaning. I am using it here to describe how we are managing, coping and acting cautiously in this transitional period for cataloguing.
Background
The IRIS Consortium (http://www.iris-firenze.org), founded in 1993, is an association of seven art history and humanities libraries in the Florence area. The members are the Berenson Library (Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), the library of the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut (NIKI), the libraries of the Gallerie degli Uffizi which include the main library, the Prints and Drawings Library, and the six specialized libraries at Palazzo Pitti, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, the Biblioteca Ugo Procacci of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (focused on the literature about the conservation and restoration of artworks) and, the Leonardiana Library at Vinci, the library of record for a vast bibliography on all aspects of Leonardo studies.
We are clients of ExLibris, our library management system is ALEPH version 22. The catalogue consists of over 360,000 bibliographic records and circa 143,000 authority records mainly from the Library of Congress. Our cataloguers use AACR2 in English and its translation in Italian. We are a bilingual catalogue: the American and Dutch partners catalogue in English, the Italian partners in Italian. For subject analysis the American and Dutch partners use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) while the Italian cataloguers provide subject access using terms from the Soggettario maintained by Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
Our sources of records in RDA are monthly file loads from the Berenson Library, and LC records via the Z39.50 protocol and the number of RDA records in our union catalogue is 5274. Our presence in WorldCat via OCLC's initiative Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a point of pride for us, circa 326,00 of our records point the end-user to the IRIS catalogue.
RDA transition
As the Cataloguing Specialist for the consortium, I monitor the AUTOCAT and RDA-L listservs whose lively discussions and e-forum offerings have permitted me a decent, if general, overview of the cataloguing situation as...