Not to be confused with nutrition labels' "Recommended Dietary Allowance", the librarians' RDA stands for Resource Descriptor Allocators.
The first time I came across this acronym was more than a year ago and not it seems that a lot of things has happened in this area. Last week I was fortunate to have been able to attend a CAVAL-sponsored lecture on RDA and was able to make sense of it.
RDA is going to supersede AACR2, will be released sometime in 2009 and will be implemented in 2010. It is primarily web-based and based on the screenshots shown to us, the text are supported by hyperlinks. It is based on concepts from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). A Joint Steering Committee (JSC) composed of the ALA, the Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACoC), the British Library, the Canadian Committee on Cataloging (CCC), and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) are responsible for developing standards. The Library of Congree who used to be part of the JSC has pulled out from contributing but will support its implementation.
Some of the reasons why this new standard is being developed are:
- to simplify rules;
- to accommodate newly emerging resources previously limited in AACR2;
- to support flexible catalogues; and
- to provide more consistency in description independent of any particular syntax or structure.
From my understanding, RDA is a totally new paradign in cataloguing because of the "entity relationship model" it is based on. In FRBR, there are three groups of entities. Group 1 is made up of the creative work (idea), the form in which the work is expressed (text, audio, video, etc.), the manifestation of the work (book, talking book, painting, etc.), and a sample of that manifestation or simply the number of copies fo the work. Group 2 entities are responsible for creating the work hence composed of persons and corporate bodies and Group 3 entities are those that involve subjects, place or event.
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