After much anticipation the RDA Toolkit was finally released on June 23, 2010 and free access
was made available until the end of August. This coincided with the beginning of an evaluation period
initiated by the Library of Congress and a group of 25 American libraries to test the feasibility of
implementing RDA. The necessity for the testing of RDA grew out of cautions expressed in the Final
Report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.22
In response to concerns about RDA raised by the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of
Bibliographic Control, the three U.S. national libraries--the Library of Congress (LC), the National
Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Agricultural Library (NAL)--made a commitment to the
further development and completion of RDA. The three libraries agreed to make a joint decision on
whether or not to implement RDA, based on the results of a test of both RDA and the Web product. 23
For a three month period beginning in September RDA test records will be created by these
libraries and the record creation experience recorded and evaluated. In the New Year these records will
be analyzed and feedback from the library community will be gathered. A final decision on whether to