Essay --

Summary RDA is a new content standard for resource description and access designed for the digital world. RDA supersedes AACR2; it builds on what was good in AACR2 and takes different approach to resource description. It focuses on user and the information they need. The guidelines are based on principles that guide not rule that constrict. When look at these principles, starting with â€Å"Convenience of the user,† it is clear that used terminology should be easy for users to understand. RDA provides more flexible framework to address the challenges of describing digital resources data that is compatible with existing records already in online library catalogs because of RDA’s foundations in the principles set by AACR. RDA is designed as an online product for use in a Web environment. It is based on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and related new data models Instructions for recording data presented independently of guidelines for data display to provide mor e flexibility for records used in a variety of online environments. More â€Å"user-friendly" layout and formatting, with instructions written in â€Å"plain† English so that the code can be used more easily beyond the library world. It is important that information we provide to be bibliographically significant to the needs of our users. To standardize descriptions and the constructions of access points as much as possible. Such consistency increases the ability to push bibliographic and authority data worldwide. The International Cataloguing Principles expand beyond just author and title access to declare that we want to find resources by subject and even want to enable limiting a search or filtering a search by other criteria like language, country, date of publicati... ...the descriptive rules, some punctuation rules from ISBD, new 3xx MaRC codes, and the general concept of recording relationships. While the Scholastic library staff is far too small to allow drawing any concrete conclusions, the fact that the intern catalogers often produced RDA-compliant cataloging without ever reading an RDA rule is surely a hopeful sign that training new catalogers to use the new code will be relatively easy. If the basics of description, some punctuation, and the general idea of specifying relationships are likely to be understood immediately and done correctly with little more than a cursory introduction, training and teaching will be able to concentrate on those aspects of RDA that are more difficult to grasp. In addition, supervisors and teachers will be able to put increased emphasis on the important question of why the code is the way it is.