Bibliographic Relationships “in the Links Below”: The RDA Designators’ Applicability to YouTube Video Descriptions

Abstract

Professor Philip Hider was Head of the School of Information (and latterly Communication) Studies from 2008 to 2023. He has published numerous papers on cataloging and metadata topics, and in library and information science more broadly. He worked as a cataloger at the British Library in the 1990s and headed up the national cataloging network in Singapore prior to moving to Charles Sturt University in 2003. He holds a PhD from City University, London. The inter-resource relationship designators listed in RDA: Resource Description and Access are assessed in terms of their wider applicability, by examining the links provided in 500 YouTube video descriptions. In addition to 128 links to other resources on the same topic, 90 links represented intrinsic relationships between resources, all of which could be assigned an RDA designator, although in some cases more specific designators not in RDA could have been used. Overall, the findings suggest RDA provides a robust framework for the description of bibliographic relationships beyond the library setting, at least with respect to internet videos.