Intended for use by libraries and other cultural organizations such as museums and archives, RDA is the successor to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2).
RDA emerged from the International Conference on the Principles & Future Development of AACR held in Toronto in 1997.
As of 2015, RSC is undergoing a transition to an international governance structure, expected to be in place in 2019.
RDA is in step with the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles published by IFLA in 2009, and updated in 2016.
As of May 2017, the RDA Toolkit has been translated from English into Catalan, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
[10] RDA Reference is currently being translated into these languages as well as others including Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Swedish, and Vietnamese.
[16] The earliest possible date for implementation was given as January 2013, as the consensus emerging from the analysis of the test data showed that while there were discernible benefits to implementing RDA, these benefits would not be realized without further changes to current cataloging practices, including developing a successor to the MARC format.