LCCN, June 11, 2013
ISSN 2324-6464 Producing Training Webcasts for the Name Authority Cooperative Program, Part 2 By Beth Davis-Brown Program Coordinator, Cooperative & Instructional Programs Division, Library of Congress I wrote last month about one of my roles at the Library of Congress as producer of two recent Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) training webcast series to teach authorized NACO contributors the tenets of RDA: Resource Description & Access. The initial series came out in May of 2012, and a version in Spanish was released in May 2013. You can find them at http://www.loc.gov/catworkshop/courses/rda_naco/ and http://www.loc.gov/catworkshop/courses/rda_naco_spanish.html . After the release of the initial series in May 2012, we began hearing feedback from other NACO libraries that the series was quite helpful to them. At the same time, we were seriously planning the training of the Librarys own staff who would be applying the new RDA instructions. As part of the internal Library of Congress training, staff watched components of the NACO training series on their own schedule and participated in classroom discussion and exercises based on the content. Our Overseas Offices were able to use the webcasts after downloading them from the Librarys iTunesU site, as the streaming media was at times difficult for them to access consistently while overseas. Another way we knew we had been successful was that Melanie Polutta and Paul Frank, the trainers in the series, were recognized at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Anaheim by librarians they had never met who had watched the series online. (I had predicted library world stardom for the two of them as the result of the webcasts and I was correct.) With the affirmation of the value and efficiency of presenting the training via webcasts, we planned supplemental RDA training for catalogers who work in non-Latin languages. I began working with Joan Biella of the Israel and Judaica Cataloging Section and Jessalyn Zoom of the Cooperative Programs Section similarly to the way in which I had prepared Melanie and Paul for their shoot. We filmed on July 12, 2012, and Joan and Jessalyn did a very good job explaining the subtleties and nuances of the RDA environment for catalogers working in non-Latin languages, both in transliteration and in their own scripts. You can find these two segments at: http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5606 and http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5604 Meanwhile, our colleague Ana Cristán of the Policy and Standards Division had been active in efforts to train catalogers in RDA both inside and outside of the Library of Congress, and she is a frequent traveler in the Latin American cataloging community as a trainer and presenter. Through Anas contacts, we learned there was interest in presenting the RDA training for Spanish-speaking NACO participant libraries. We were honored to have Ageo García of Tulane University, Monica Calderón Carranza of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and Julia Margarita Martínez Saldaña from the Universidad de San Luis Potosí in Mexico travel to Washington in October of 2012 with the plan to shoot the series in Spanish. Ana and the three visitors were translators of the RDA course materials into Spanish and were well-versed in its intricacies through their work. We also enlisted the assistance of Spanish-speaking Library of Congress staff to serve as their interlocutors, including yours truly. We rehearsed on October 15, 2012, and were ready to shoot in the studio on the following day. I was assisted this time by Glenn Ricci as our director and Dominique Pickett as the post-production coordinator, both from the Librarys Multimedia Group. Ageo, Monica, and Julia Margarita were joined by Ana Cristán, Paul Frank, Héctor Morey, Carlos Olave, Melanie Polutta, Roberto Sicre, and me in the various segments. In addition to her on-air presence, Ana was the chief content wrangler, making sure that the topics covered were congruent with the English series and that the slide presentations were up-to-date for later editing. We held a second recording session in November after our guests had returned home to film the portions of the series that included only Library of Congress staff. Post-Production The editing and post-production process on this series was more difficult than with the English version. There had been more stops and starts as we filmed, and Dominique and I spent much time before and after the winter holidays completing a coherent draft cut. Ana and Melanie joined us to double check the edits and to complete the painstaking task of dropping the slides into the presentations at the correct times. The captioning process working in Spanish was new to me but went fairly well, as did preparing the series to be placed on the Librarys website. Press releases announcing Formación RDA para participantes de NACO were written in both English and Spanish, and we were finally ready to announce the series on May 10. Whats next? Now that we have the experience of creating webcasts for cataloging training, we have another tool for sharing expertise held by Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access staff. Online training requires an initial investment in time to create the course and needs resources for the capture and production of the material, but it is economical once it is created in comparison to the time and expense of sending teachers around the world for in-person instruction. Melanie Polutta Library of Congress LCCN Editor
