Tim Knight is of Head of Technical Services in the Osgoode library and a leading figure in developing standards for the cataloguing and classification of legal materials in Canada. His article about the new cataloguing rules, "Resource Description and Access: From AACR to RDA", was recently published in the Canadian Law Library Review. The article is also available on York Space, York University's institutional repsitory.
Abstract: The new cataloguing guidelines Resource Description and Access (RDA) have recently been released and are set to replace the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. An evaluation period led by the Library of Congress is currently underway and it is likely that the implementation of RDA will begin sometime in mid-2011. This paper looks briefly at the origins of RDA, provides a high level overview of RDA and reviews some of the major differences that cataloguers and library users can expect to find between RDA and AACR2.