Resource Description and Access

Resource Description and Access (RDA) is a standard for descriptive cataloging initially released in June 2010, providing instructions and guidelines on formulating bibliographic data. Intended for use by libraries and related cultural organizations such as museums and archives, RDA is the successor to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2), the prevailing standard for English language libraries since 1978.

RDA emerged from the International Conference on the Principles & Future Development of AACR held in Toronto in 1997. It is published jointly by the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in the UK. RDA instructions and guidelines are available through RDA Toolkit, an online subscription site, and in a print format. Maintenance of RDA is the responsibility of the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA (JSC). The JSC is composed of representatives from the three RDA publishers and the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, the British Library, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, and the Library of Congress.

The primary distinction between RDA and AACR is structural. RDA is organised based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). These principles identify both the 'user tasks', which a library catalog should make possible, and a hierarchy of relationships in bibliographic data. Descriptions produced using the instructions of RDA are intended to be compatible with any coding schema, including the data environments used for existing records created under the AACR2 rules.

In March 2012 the Library of Congress announced that it would fully implement RDA cataloging by the end of March 2013. Library and Archives Canada fully implemented the standard in September 2013. Several other national libraries including the British Library, National Library of Australia, and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek also planned to implement RDA in 2013.

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