Information about the planning underway for the MARC replacement can be found in Sally McCallum’s slides from a talk given at IGeLU:  http://igelu.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IGeLU-sally-McCallum.pptx. These includes interesting glimpses into the future. A timeline information on slide 29 predicts Phase 1.5, early experimentation with a very small group, should take place October-November.
I recently published an article in the Journal of Library Metadata comparing MARC’s death with Language death http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19386389.2012.700604  and discussed what language planning and death could teach us about MARC’s replacement. The most recent slideshow illustrates how essential it is to develop a common understanding of words.   When you use pre-existing words to convey specific concepts with a non-typical meaning, people are not going to realize that they don’t understand each other.
Word Ambiguity
Annotation is usually defined as a critical or explanatory note or body of notes added to a text. Slide 24 uses the term Annotation as “a resource that decorates other MARCR resources like holdings, cover images and reviewsâ€, thus changing the definition from explanation to decoration.
Slide 23 delineates four core classes. The Work class reflects the conceptual essence of the item “roughly equivalent to a FRBR work or expressionâ€. Instance, a word usually defined as a case or occurrence,  now as a core class means  “a resource reflecting an individual, material embodiment of the Work†, a good definition, but also different.
Interesting wording on Slide 18 as both FRBR and RDA are called “previous efforts” implying they are in the past, when RDA is yet to be completely implemented.
Language also grows through the creation of totally new words. In such cases definitions are created through context. Eric Miller (Zepheira)  tweeted “these slides are high level MARCitecture in nature, details soon” See: https://twitter.com/erimille/status/250343696510353408. At least it is easily discernible what that word means.
After looking over the slides from the presentation, I felt a bit dismayed. Why did they come up with these four new core classes? Why didn’t they use the existing FRBR concepts, which the library community has already more or less adopted, and which we’ve now spent a lot of time thinking about, writing about, and training librarians about? I don’t think that these four core classes give us anything that FRBR didn’t, nor do they simplify the FRBR model.
I’m also concerned that the collaboration step is fairly far into their project plan. I can’t help feeling that a lot of this work is being done now in a less-than-transparent way, and without enough input from the community. Maybe that is a misperception, but I feel like I’m just waiting to hear these tidbits about what they’re doing, and that the work is happening behind a curtain somewhere.
Also available is Eric Miller’s talk at the Library of Congress about the new bibliographic framework.
http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5605