Cyril Oberlander, winner of the 2012 Virginia Boucher-OCLC Distinguished Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Librarian Award, will begin the conference with his keynote address "The Future of Interlibrary Loan- Valued Role in Transforming Libraries". He will discuss what libraries will experience looking forward to the next five years, and what it will mean for their services, roles, skills, and expectations.

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Your special collection includes audiovisual treasures that must be preserved, but you haven't received enough training to feel comfortable with this responsibility. If this is you, you'll want to join Rebecca Elder, our Adjunct Field Preservation Services Officer, for convenient, at-your-desktop training December 12 and December 14 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and learn what you need do to keep your collection in optimal condition.

Preserving the investment in your audiovisual collections presents a unique challenge to libraries, archives, and museums. The wide variety of A/V formats - videotapes, audiotapes, motion picture film, filmstrips, LPs, CDs, and DVDs - requires special attention to prevent deterioration caused by everything from daily use to storage problems. 

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Amigos is pleased to offer a 15 percent consortia discount for RDA Toolkit solo and site subscriptions. Amigos is passing along the entire discount as a benefit to Amigos members.

Resource Description and Access (RDA) is the new, unified cataloging standard, an evolution of the cataloging principles from AACR2 with rules carried over or adapted to the RDA model. Both the Library of Congress and U.S. National Library of Medicine have announced they are moving forward with full implementation of RDA on March 31, 2013. The toolkit is an online, web-based tool published by the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

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Both the Library of Congress (LC) and U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced they are moving forward with full implementation of Resource Description and Access (RDA) on March 31, 2013. Now that implementation is around the corner, is your library ready for RDA?

To help you get ready for RDA, Amigos has scheduled a face-to-face training session, Cataloging with RDA, at the University of Missouri (Columbia, MO) on December 11, 2012. Topics covered include: a FRBR review; RDA Core elements for description, preferred titles and names; changes from AACR2; articulating relationships between resources and entities; RDA Toolkit functionality; using workflows and mappings to catalog materials with RDA. Through exercises and hands-on cataloging experiences, participants will receive a thorough grounding in RDA. Visit the Amigos web site for a complete description and online registration.

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Due to the high demand for online RDA training, Amigos has scheduled three additional classes of Cataloging with RDA. This 8-hour live online class walks you through the basics of moving from AACR2 to RDA, including:

• Distinguishing between work, expression, manifestation, and item
• Building descriptions of resources using RDA Core elements
• Creating authorized access points using preferred names for persons, families, and corporate bodies and preferred titles for works
• Articulating relationships between works, expressions, manifestations, and items and between resources and persons, families, and corporate bodies using RDA vocabularies
• Using the RDA Toolkit and workflows to identify rules relevant to describing resources and creating access points

Full class description and online registration for this session.

Full class description and online registration for this session.

Full class description and online registration for this session.

Amigos is offering two informative Know & Go sessions in the coming weeks: The New WorldShare ILL, and All About Preservation Site Surveys.

The New WorldShare ILL is scheduled for November 26 from 1:30 - 2:30 p.m. CST. Join Tim Prather, Amigos' Continuing Education Librarian, for this informative hour and learn about OCLC WorldShare Interlibrary Loan, a new service that is replacing WorldCat Resource Sharing. This new service centralizes workflows now managed in multiple systems and will provide new functionality that speeds fulfillment of interlibrary loan requests while saving time for library staff and library users. Register on the Amigos website.