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RDA Technical Guidelines
This Technical Guidelines document is a guide for RDA usage within a local application. It instructs developers on how to use RDA data available via the RDA Registry. The Technical Guidelines are intended for the use of technical users of the data, and explain the decisions that underlie the data and the structure of the RDA Registry.
RDA is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) conceptual models. Those models include entities that are useful to identify and describe resources in order to support discovery and other tasks undertaken by a user. FRBR defines four user tasks:
Search: Search for a resource corresponding to stated criteria (i.e., to search either a single entity or a set of entities using an attribute or relationship ofthe entity as the search criteria).
Identify: Identify a resource (i.e., to confirm that the entity described or located corresponds to the entity sought or to distinguish between two or more entities with similar characteristics).
Select: Select a resource that is appropriate to the user’s needs (i.e., to choose an entity that meets the user’s requirements with respect to content, physical format, etc., or to reject an entity as being inappropriate to the user’s needs).
Obtain: Access a resource either physically or electronically through an online connection to a remote computer and/or acquire a resource through purchase, license, loan, etc.
Each RDA element is related to one or more user tasks.
FRBR was first published in 1998 (http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records) as a final report of a study group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). It was first envisioned as an entity-relationship model, but has since been presented in an object-oriented model known as FRBRoo (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html). Although one might expect that in the internet age such a model based on traditional notions of ‘catalogs’ might be outdated and abandoned, it continues to be discussed, adapted and improved. Details of FRBRer classes and properties as well as review activities are available directly from the IFLA website (http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records) as well as in the Open Metadata Registry (http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/5.html).
FRAD, an extension of the conceptual model of FRBR, was published in 2009. Details of FRAD classes and properties have also been made available in the Open Metadata Registry: http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/24.html.
A third model cited as a basis for RDA is the Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM), originally published by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) in 2007 (http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/). DCMI, recognizing changes in the metadata environment since the publication of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is in the process of reviewing the DCAM.
Further information on these three models is available in the References section at the end of this document.
Possibly the most important shift in bibliographic approaches that RDA represents is the focus on relationships. RDA is currently focused on seven entities, falling into two groups: Work/Expression/Manifestation/Item (WEMI) for describing and identifying resources; and Person/Family/Corporate body (PFC) for describing and identifying the agents responsible for various aspects of resources. The entities are defined and distinct and RDA assigns separate sets of attributes to them.
Figure 1: RDA entity relationships