Collection materials and RDA
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) has implemented a new cataloguing standard describing materials held in our collections.
Known as the Resource Description and Access or RDA, the new standard will make it easier to find items, reduce the use of abbreviations, makes records easier to read and will be easier to identify the type of material being described, such as electronic or audiovisual resources.
World leaders in the cataloguing field such as the National Library of Australia, the Library of Congress, the British Library and Library and Archives Canada have already implemented the new standard and AIATSIS is among the early Australian adopters.
AIATSIS Collections Director Lyndall Osborne said the RDA cataloguing standard replaces the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, a system almost as old as our Institute, and was developed with specific clients in mind.
“Rules in the previous standard had a limited number of search terms that could be added, with RDA we can now add names of more authors, collectors and contributors to records to assist with searches,” Ms Osborne said.
“This means improved discoverability of collection items providing a more meaningful search experience.”
The RDA cataloguing standard is a fresh way of thinking about data and a step closer to a system which allows for relationships to be created between one resource and another.
“Newly created AIATSIS catalogue records can now sit alongside records produced by other metadata providers,” Ms Osborne said.
“This means they can be shared with other discovery platforms like the National Library of Australia’s Trove and will be compatible with a number of other metadata schemas, like Dublin core.
“Complex relationships exist between resources, persons, families, corporate bodies and subjects in the collections. RDA allows links to be created between these relationships.
“It is the links created by these relationships which will add to the already valuable metadata in Mura®, the AIATSIS Collections Catalogue.”
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