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The aim of this paper is to highlight the relationship between cataloging data and reference service and the importance of including reference librarians, in general resource description and access (RDA) training.

A literature review and the author’s experiences related to implementing RDA are presented with minimal cataloging jargon to help librarians better understand the effects of cataloging standards on reference service.

There is a noticeable lack of research and training related to RDA for audiences beyond technical services. More research is needed to determine how users are interacting with the catalog, how bibliographic data is supporting their discovery and access, what, if any, obstacles reference librarians encounter as a result of RDA and how future iterations of RDA may open bibliographic data to communities beyond the library.

This paper is one the few that discuss how RDA may affect reference service. It will be useful for providing librarians with a general understanding of the relationship between cataloging and reference and may serve as a starting point for further research.

Within standards for bibliographic description, common usage has served as a prominent design principle, guiding the choice and form of certain names and titles. In practice, however, the determination of common usage is difficult and lends itself to varying interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the presence and role of common usage in bibliographic description through an examination of previously unexplored connections between common usage and the concept of warrant.

A brief historical review of the concept of common usage was conducted, followed by a case study of the current bibliographic standard Resource Description and Access (RDA) employing qualitative content analysis to examine the appearances, delineations and functions of common usage. Findings were then compared to the existing literature on warrant in knowledge organization.

Multiple interpretations of common usage coexist within RDA and its predecessors, and the current prioritization of these interpretations tends to render user perspectives secondary to those of creators, scholars and publishers. These varying common usages and their overall reliance on concrete sources of evidence reveal a mixture of underlying warrants, with literary warrant playing a more prominent role in comparison to the also present scientific/philosophical, use and autonomous warrants.

This paper offers new understanding of the concept of common usage, and adds to the body of work examining warrant in knowledge organization practices beyond classification. It sheds light on the design of the influential standard RDA while revealing the implications of naming and labeling in widely shared bibliographic data.

To raise consciousness among librarians and library directors about the need to structure our descriptive data for library resources in a way that is machine-actionable in the Semantic Web, not just the library silos of MARC-based systems.

Narrative overview.

By assuring library metadata is in a well-formed structure, libraries can place access to their collections on the Web where their users are.

The new cataloging code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), is one step in the direction toward more interoperability in the Semantic Web.

New perspective on this issue is to urge librarians to work with systems people and vendors for next generation systems that build on the relationships and identifying characteristics of well-formed metadata arising from use of the RDA.

This chapter aims to help librarians understand the underlying rationale for Resource Description and Access (RDA) and recognize the great potential of the Semantic Web for libraries.

It explains the linked data model and Semantic Web technologies in basic, informative terms, and describes how the Semantic Web is constructed. Semantic Web standards and technologies are discussed in detail, including URI, RDF, and ontologies. The study also traces the development of RDA and some of the major library Semantic Web projects. The authors explore how RDA shapes bibliographical data and prepares it for linked data in the Semantic Web. In addition, this study examines what libraries in the United States and the rest of the world have achieved in implementing RDA since its release.

RDA is the correct approach libraries should take.

This is the first and only chapter that covers the development of RDA in other countries as well as in the United States. It is highly informative for anyone who wishes to understand the RDA and Semantic Web and their relevance to libraries in a short period of time.

Article provides an overview (as of September 2006) of the genesis, history, and processes involved in creating the new cataloging rules, a work‐in‐progress, under the working title, RDA: Resource Description and Access. Also discusses structure and content, as well as possible uses outside of the library community.

Describes the history of the new rules and how they are currently organized, as well as where to go to keep informed of the new rules.

RDA will likely be adopted by libraries; because of its flexibility, there is a possibility that other non‐library and non‐MARC information communities will also be able to make use of this tool.

Article is of great benefit to librarians who want an overview of RDA in a nutshell. Provokes thought on flexibility of the new rules, using them for other communications standards than MARC and for other metadata schemas.

The purpose of this paper is to validate the usefulness of resource description and access (RDA) from user perspectives by implementing an RDA-based bibliographic retrieval system, and comparing it against two retrieval systems.

Surveys and interviews were conducted to gather responses from 20 subjects who used the systems. Usability was measured according to the following metrics: search usefulness from search process and results; search efficiency, measured in time and the number of steps involved; general satisfaction for search results and process, and for information need; satisfaction for search functionalities, with five sub-measures (usability of functions of search tool, appropriateness of search results, usability of additional information, usability of associative relations, and appropriateness of search categories); and system convenience in terms of understandability and ease.

The survey results indicate that all but the satisfaction for appropriateness of search categories showed significant differences between the systems. The interviews show that the RDA system received from the subjects a more positive evaluation compared to the counterpart systems, in search usefulness, search efficiency, general search satisfaction, satisfaction for search functionalities.

Though a few organizations such as the Library of Congress in the USA have implemented RDA, no such endeavors have been undertaken in the context of Korean bibliography, and especially for the systematic validation of usability of such a system from user perspectives.

This is the first published study that validates the usefulness perceived by users of RDA in the context of Korean bibliography.

Purpose — This chapter uniquely addresses the topic of introducing a common set of cataloguing rules throughout Europe. While no such development is on the immediate horizon, there are signs that current trends are moving towards that possibility. At first glance, this may appear a trivial development in that ‘European’ standards in many areas are in place and not a source of contention, but in cataloguing, this is not the case.

Design/methodology/approach — The main method used for the research was an in-depth literature review. To gauge the current state of European interest in RDA, an email survey was performed in August 2011, of all the European members of the Standing Committee of the Cataloguing Section of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), and all the European speakers at the ‘RDA in Europe: making it happen!’ conference. This sample was chosen as being those individuals who would be most able to give a view from Europe on current cataloguing developments.

Findings — There is considerable interest throughout Europe regarding RDA and harmonising cataloguing codes, but there may be conceptual problems in that some European national cultures may diverge significantly from a core of rules based on English-speaking countries.

Originality/value — This chapter combines in-depth analysis of the proposed new cataloguing code Resource Description and Access (RDA), which will be adopted by English-speaking countries with a novel perspective relating to its adoption in non-English-speaking countries in Europe.

The 1998 International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) document “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR) has inspired a family of models that view bibliographic resources in terms of multiple entities differentiated with regard to meaning, expression, and physicality. The purpose of this paper is to compare how three FRBR and FRBR-like models have been expressed as Semantic Web vocabularies based on Resource Description Framework (RDF). The paper focusses on IFLA’s own vocabulary for FRBR; RDF vocabularies for Resource Description and Access (RDA), an emergent FRBR-based standard for library cataloging; and BIBFRAME, an emergent FRBR-like, native-RDF standard for bibliographic data.

Simple test records using the RDF vocabularies were analyzed using software that supports inferencing.

In some cases, what the data actually means appears to differ from what the vocabulary developers presumably intended to mean. Data based on the FRBR vocabulary appears particularly difficult to integrate with data based on different models.

Some of the RDF vocabularies reviewed in the paper could usefully be simplified, enabling libraries to integrate their data more easily into the wider information ecosystem on the Web. Requirements for data consistency and quality control could be met by emergent standards of the World Wide Web Consortium for validating RDF data according to integrity constraints.

There are few such comparisons of the RDF expressions of these models, which are widely assumed to represent the future of library cataloging.

This study aims to investigate Malaysian catalogers’ awareness, familiarity and understanding of the new bibliographic content standard, i.e. Resource Description and Access (RDA).

The survey method was adopted in this study. Questionnaires were used to gather data from respondents. The study included catalogers from higher education institutions in the area of Klang Valley, Malaysia. Purposive sampling method was used to identify the respondents.

The results revealed that, in general, though Malaysian catalogers were aware of the RDA, they were only familiar with the basics of RDA and its related topics. They were mainly aware of topics regarding the overview and development of RDA, and indicated low understanding of other topics, such as Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), related to RDA. The study found that respondents acknowledged the inadequacy of their basic understanding of RDA. The study also identified the catalogers’ needs and preference for RDA training. Most of the catalogers favored learning more about RDA context topics which include FRBR, Functional Requirements for Authority Data and International Cataloging Principles. They indicated willingness to undergo a two- to three-day intensive workshop to learn more about RDA.

Like in other countries, catalogers in Malaysia may also encounter problems when implementing the new RDA. Findings of this study would be useful in designing RDA trainings for catalogers.

No study has been done to investigate Malaysian catalogers’ awareness and understanding of RDA.