1 January 2009 - 12:00
Library catalogues today need to harness the full power of the metadata that librarians have carefully created over previous decades. For those who describe resources the challenge is to create metadata which meets users needs for data content and also facilitates machine manipulation of that data for searching and display. Resource Description and Access (RDA) will be an important building block in the creation of better catalogues and resource discovery systems. RDA is the new standard for description and access set to replace the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) in 2009.
RDA focuses on the data elements needed to meet the user tasks specified in the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Records) conceptual models. The use of FRBR concepts will allow the relationships between multiple versions of a resource to be presented to users in a meaningful way.