Among the JSC’s decisions at this meeting was to change its name to the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, emphasizing the future edition.

Several decisions on specific rules within RDA were made.

• Among the details the JSC decided was that alternative titles (such as "The star-gazer" within the title "Ahab’s wife, or, The star-gazer") will no longer be considered part of the title proper and will no longer be coded as such in MARC 21 bibliographic records.
• JSC also decided to use "Publisher not identified," "Place of publication not identified" and "Date of publication not identified" as the terms to describe those situations where publication data is lacking and cannot be supplied. (According to RDA 0.1.9, catalogers will be able to use equivalent terms in the appropriate language of the bibliographic description.)
• Within Chapter 6, "Persons, Families, and Corporate Bodies Associated with a Resource," JSC decided to make the instructions on designating a role more prominent and to include an appendix with a controlled vocabulary of terms for use in designating roles.
• Within Part B of RDA, "Access Point Control," a decision was made to simplify the instructions on assigning access points for creators and contributors of a resource’s content.

One issue the JSC discussed is whether RDA will contain any changes to AACR2 practice governing choice of main entry and form of access points. There was agreement that there will be no deviation from AACR2 without strong justification, considering the costs typically involved in altering headings.

JSC also discussed what instructions should be in RDA on formulating access points for families. The issue is difficult because differences exist in practice for creating such headings amongst various interested communities.

Rules for controlled access points for the Bible were also addressed. In RDA, the Old and New Testaments will be referred to as such. AACR2 practice has been to use the abbreviations "O.T." and "N.T." for the construction of uniform titles; this will not be continued in RDA. For individual books of the Bible, catalogers will use for the access point the name of the book immediately following the word "Bible" without the name of the appropriate Testament inserted between the two.

For more details on the April meeting’s outcome, please visit the Web site noted above.

The JSC will next meet in October 2007 in Chicago. A complete draft of RDA is scheduled to be available in Decemeber.