Répertoire de vedettes-matière de l'Université Laval

RVM was created and is updated by the Répertoire de vedettes-matière section of the Université Laval Library in Québec City, and it contains over 300,000 authority records.

The Répertoire de vedettes-matière was created in 1946,[1] when Université Laval librarians took the initiative to reuse the catalogue records from the Library of Congress's National Union Catalog to describe the documents in their collection.

After the first official edition of the Répertoire was published in 1962, RVM attracted the attention of major documentary institutions in Québec and across Canada that recognized it as an essential tool for systemizing and standardizing methods for representing the content of their collections.

A formal collaboration agreement between the two institutions was signed, and the first team of librarians dedicated solely to the intellectual management of RVM was established at Université Laval.

In 1980 the Université Laval Library signed a collaboration agreement with France's National Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), allowing it to use RVM as the basic corpus for creating its subject headings authority index, known as Répertoire d'autorité matière encyclopédique et alphabétique unifié (RAMEAU), the only French-language equivalent of RVM still in use today.

It is a translation and adaptation of the following thesauruses : It also contains original authorities exclusive to RVM, as well as equivalence with RAMEAU of Bibliothèque nationale de France.