National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 2009

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Resource Description and Access

Deirdre Kiorgaard

Abstract


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.

RDA will have its own data element vocabulary, and specific vocabularies for content types, carrier types, roles, and relationships. These vocabularies have been developed in collaboration with other communities, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). They will be made available in machine readable/actionable Resource Description Framework (RDF) through the work of the DCMI/RDA Working Group.

This presentation will provide an overview of the advantages of RDA for libraries and library users, and explain what librarians need to do to prepare for RDA's implementation in Australian libraries.


Full Text: Paper Presentation