RDA: Resource Description and Access : il nuovo standard per la metadatazione e la scoperta delle risorse nell'era digitale

This work is designed for four kind of readers: cataloguing students, aspirant librarians, librarians who wish to
keep up-to-date and anyone who wishes to describe and give access to any kind of resource on the web. Last kind
is original but important, because it is expressive of the great change that RDA (Resource Description and Access)
is going to promote. In fact, guidelines – rather than rules – are addressed to anyone wishes to describe and make
accessible a cultural heritage collection or tout court a collection: librarians, archivists, curators and professionals
in any other branch of knowledge. The work is organized in two parts: the former contains theoretical foundations
of cataloguing (FRBR, ICP, semantic web and linked data), the latter a critical presentation of RDA guidelines. RDA
aims to make possible creation of well-structured metadata for any kind of resources, reusable in any context
and technological environment. RDA offers a “set of guidelines and instructions to create data for discovery of
resources”. Guidelines stress four actions – to identify, to relate (from FRBR/FRAD user tasks and ICP), to represent
and to discover – and a noun: resource. To identify entities of Group 1 and Group 2 of FRBR (Work, Expression,
Manifestation, Item, Person, Family, Corporate Body); to relate entities of Group 1 and Group 2 of FRBR, by means
of relationships. To enable users to represent and discover entities of Group 1 and Group 2 by means of their attributes
and relationships. These last two actions are the reason of users’ searches, and users are the pinpoint of
the process. RDA enables the discovery of recorded knowledge, that is any resource conveying information, any
resources transmitting intellectual or artistic content by means of any kind of carrier and media. RDA is a content
standard, not a display standard nor an encoding standard: it gives instructions to identify data and does not care
about how display or encode data produced by guidelines. RDA requires an original approach, a metanoia, a deep
change in the way we think about cataloguing. Innovations in RDA are many: it promotes interoperability between
catalogs and other search tools, it adopts terminology and concepts of the Semantic Web, it is a global standard,
it can be applied by different agencies to create data. RDA is expected to be enriched by wide community of professional,
from all the world, in a collaborative, well-aware, recognized and global perspective. By RDA, the great
tradition of cataloguing goes one step further and enters in the digital age definitively.