An Analytical Study on the Usability of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) in the New Information Environment: the Necessity of Defining New Functions and Relationships

The purpose of the research is to analyze the usability of Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard for describing and organizing the content objects of the new information environment. The present research is a conceptual research having been done based on an analytical-critical approach. Meanwhile, introducing the characteristics of new media and environment and its influence on the knowledge organization process, and analyzing internal and external relationships among the quadruple levels of content objects presented in RDA, RDA's capabilities has been evaluated to respond to the new environment's features. The findings show "Resource Description and Access (RDA)" is undesirable for describing the digital content objects, because of its deficiencies including the use of traditional tools and approaches as a basis for standard extension, lack of suitable coordination with metadata standards, and lack of enough attention to the content object's characteristics available on the new environment, The defect of RDA have necessitated a revision of bibliographic relationships and functions included by the standard. finally, the researcher has suggested two new bibliographic relationships "part/part" and "shared characteristics", and three new functions "housekeeping", "organizing", and "expansion" as the appropriate solutions for more adaptability of RDA to the new information environment.