RDA Made Simple

Book excerpt: Looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one guide to RDA that keeps it simple and provides exactly what you need to know? This book covers planning and training considerations, presents relevant FRBR and FRAD background, and offers practical, step-by-step cataloging advice for a variety of material formats. The new cataloging standard, Resource Description and Access (RDA), will have far-reaching impacts on your library in terms of how it approaches resource description and access. RDA has been in use at the U.S. Library of Congress since early 2013 and is being widely adopted in the international library community. Today's catalogers need to understand RDA's basic concepts and principles as well as how to apply its rules in order to provide relevant information services in the 21st-century. This book helps you tackle the challenges of implementing the new cataloging code (RDA/Resource Description and Access) in the MARC environment, providing emphasis on practical, straightforward RDA advice for today's busy cataloger. After a general discussion on planning and training for RDA, the author—a technical services/systems librarian with more than two decades' experience—presents a comprehensive review of RDA's conceptual basis in FRBR and FRAD before providing easy-to-follow, practical guidance on cataloging today's diverse library resources using the new code, covering print, audiovisual, and digital materials. The book is a must-have resource for librarians who catalog on a broad, general level, with or without authority work, and who may or may not be cataloging specialists, but are responsible for handling many different formats. Catalogers at busy libraries committed to getting their new materials out to their users as quickly as possible will also find this work extremely helpful.