RDA Toolkit

The RDA Board in consultation with the Copyright Holders of RDA have determined that a hard date for the removal of the original RDA Toolkit website is needed. This determination was made against a backdrop of giving user communities plenty of time for planning in their transition to official RDA. The Board plans to begin a countdown clock in May 2026 (specific date still to be determined), with the removal of the original Toolkit taking place a year later—May 2027. This plan was presented to the RDA Steering Committee last week, and the RSC fully supported this decision.

After discussions with the RSC regarding the Community Resources (CR) area of RDA Toolkit, the following plan has been established to address CR structure and services. 

CR Goals and Requirements

UPDATE: As of 3pm CST on January 14th, the migration is complete. 

UPDATE: The migration process is underway. You may encounter a brief disruption to service as the change propagates across the internet. Simply clear your browser cache and refresh. Contact us at rdatoolkit@ala.org if you experience an access issue that lasts longer than an hour.

UPDATE: The migration has been postponed to Friday, January 14th.

The July 2021 release of RDA Toolkit was published on July 15th. It includes the addition of more policy statements from the Library of Congress - Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the British Library and Music Library Association Best Practices. There are also fixes and minor improvements to existing Toolkit functionality, including the introduction of blue highlight in the yellow Condition boxes to improve visibility.

We have heard from some users that examples have been few and far between. Because the RDA text is still a work in progress on the beta site, it has been difficult to write examples. When the 3R Project is complete we expect there to be many more examples in the new Toolkit as compared to the original one. Also the new Toolkit will feature new types of examples, including examples for recording methods, relationship examples, and examples in context. The attached list will guide users to instructions with a variety of examples.