RDA (Resources Description and Access): A new standard for digital environment

Abstract

Digital technologies have changed widely environment of libraries and information centers and other knowledge management organizations. So, these organizations have started designing and keeping of data bases in order to access their recourses. According to nonstop-increasing resources in these data bases and the lack of an international standards which make these resources descriptive and accessible, introducing and representing such standard is necessary. RDA as a new standard for description and access to digital resources has been designed to overcome these problems. It is based on Anglo American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). RDA is a collection of instructions and guidelines which is used to describe and access to all kinds of resources and media. We will introduce the new international standard, RDA, with a review of previous cataloguing rules in this article. RDA is being surveyed of different aspects as: necessities, structure, and consequence of use, characteristics, goals, strategies, revised and development processes. The outline of this standard will be introduced and surveyed properly. One of the important results of this paper is that the librarians and information scientists become familiar and aware with RDA and usage of it in libraries and scientific information centers