What are the Entity Relationship Diagrams and Schemas and how are they used?
The RDA Toolkit is designed to reach multiple audiences. The largest audience is catalogers, but some of the functions (while still marginally useful for catalogers) were designed with educators, system developers, researchers, and the wider metadata community in mind. Entity Relationship Diagrams are visual representations of data elements (sometimes referred to as RDA Elements) defined or inferred by RDA instructions. Schemas are machine-readable representations of these same data elements. While some catalogers may find the Entity Relationship Diagrams and the Schemas useful tools, the main audiences are likely to include database developers, IT staff, library and computer education professors, and others.
