Background: About RIMMF

Our development of RIMMF grew out of our need to understand RDA thinking.

As a cataloging trainer faced with the prospect of training catalogers to follow RDA guidelines and instructions instead of AACR rules, Deborah knew she had to understand RDA before she could hope to explain it to anyone else. Because she is a very visual person, she felt that she would never understand RDA without seeing it in action, despite attending many presentations over the course of 10 or so years, and pestering the RDA experts with countless questions.

Fortunately, Richard (the one and only programmer we have at TMQ, and its co-owner and co-decision-maker) agreed to try his hand at making an RDA input form. It is often best that we don't know how complicated things will turn out to be, before we begin 'taking a stab' at those things. Suffice it to say, that there will always be more to be done to satisfy our dreams and aspirations for RIMMF, but it is time to get it out there for others to see and use and critique and improve through suggestions.

We have developed RIMMF as:

• A visualization tool: to help you to understand the RDA concepts of attributes and relationships of the FRBR entities, by: allowing you to enter descriptive data about the attributes of relevant FRBR entities; and then linking the descriptive data between related entities.
• A training tool: to allow anyone who is trying to teach RDA the opportunity to make actual RDA-based 'records' that link to other RDA-based records.
• A development tool: to show where further work might be needed on the RDA elements and vocabulary terms.
• A software prototype: to illustrate a few of the many interface possibilities that might be available in an RDA/FRBR world. Internally, RIMMF is an application that is modeled on 'RDA Scenario 1'

At present, you cannot use RIMMF to make 'records' that will be useful in your library system. This is partly by design, and partly because no one seems to know what the format of such records will, or should, be.

We have logged numerous downloads of Version 1, and now it is time for us to release Version 2. Thinking that many of you might want to continue using what you already know, we will have parallel pages for certain instructions in this User Guide; or at least, we will try it this way and see how it goes.