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Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century

“Resource Description and Access (RDA) is a standards effort to develop cataloging rules that would supersede the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2) [8]. Work in this area has been taking place for at least a decade, starting in 1997 with the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR, held in Toronto [9]. The work on the standard takes place under the auspices of the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (JSC).

Initially, RDA was envisioned as a third edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, and was accordingly called AACR3, but in an effort to emphasize the break from the past it was renamed to Resource Description and Access (RDA). In its prospectus for RDA, the JSC expresses its intentions as:

“Built on foundations established by the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), RDA will provide a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media. The new standard is being developed for use primarily in libraries, but consultations are being undertaken with other communities (archives, museums, publishers, etc.) in an effort to attain an effective level of alignment between RDA and the metadata standards used in those communities” [10].

This quote succinctly expresses a typical contradiction in the RDA effort: the desire to continue the AACR tradition while acknowledging that a greater change is needed. RDA cannot be successful without addressing the key changes in the information environment that have caused libraries to fall behind as primary information providers. The challenges of this rapidly changing environment may be more than the developers of RDA can accommodate, given the firmness of their ties to AACR. What follows is an analysis of some of the serious issues in the RDA drafts to date, issues that may spell failure for the future of library catalogs. “

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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
cléoradar (4 juillet 2010). Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century. Cléo Radar. Consulté le 9 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mx5o