RDA, Resource Description and Access, is a set of guidelines developed by the Committee of Principals for AACR, the institution that had promoted, updated and published the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2nd Edition (AACR2). In 2004, the revision of the Anglo-American Rules began at the urging of the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR; the Joint Steering Committee had already tried to assess possible developments of the model in 1997 at a meeting held in Toronto among the world's leading cataloguing experts. However, in 2005, after realising the obsolescence of AACR2, it was decided to take a completely different approach; the draft of the first part of RDA was published at the end of that year.

Over the next two years other parts of the standard were published and in 2008 the first complete draft of the new revised text was prepared, delivered in June 2009. It was published in a loose-leaf volume and in an online version called RDA Toolkit in June 2010. On 6 November 2015 a new structure for the governance of RDA was established: the RDA Steering Committee (RSC), born from the merger of the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA (JSC) and the Committee of Principals (COP). The new organisation, responsible for RDA projects and the publication of its updates, is composed of representatives from the Library of Congress, the British Library, Library and Archives Canada, the National Library of Australia, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Since 31 March 2013 RDA has been adopted by the Library of Congress and many other American, Australian and European libraries. There have also been different translations of the standard into Catalan, Finnish, French, German, Italian (in the process of being updated), Norwegian and Spanish and many more are in progress.

RDA incorporates FRBR, FRAD, ICP and now IFLA LRM. RDA presents itself as the international standard for description and access to resources designed for the digital world. It goes beyond previous cataloguing codes as it is no longer presented as a set of standards, but rather as guidelines, continuously developed and updated instructions allowing for greater flexibility of use.

RDA constitutes a content standard, not a visualisation standard. This implies a clear separation between the instructions dealing with content – with data – and those dealing with its representation.