Making the Link: AACR to RDA: Part 1: Setting the Stage

In October 1997, the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR (JSC) held the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR in Toronto, Canada, to determine if a changing bibliographic landscape warranted fundamental rethinking of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. This paper follows the thread of those changes as, between 1997 and early 2005, JSC pursued a vigorous schedule towards a third edition of AACR. Cataloguing constituency feedback on a first draft of AACR3 prompted a change in direction to a code with the working title, Resource Description and Access (RDA)–a content standard for multi-formats and communities.