Resource Description and Access (RDA) provides a system of instructions for recording relationships between resources by means of a controlled vocabulary of relationship designators. This article examines the system and a selection of relationship designators, focusing especially on whether the designators are defined in operationally satisfactory ways. The designators are compared to corresponding categories in literary theorist Gérard Genette's taxonomy of intertextual relationships. The analysis shows that although some of the selected designators are satisfactorily operationalized, most are not. A fundamental problem is that the emphasis is on how to record machine-readable data, not on how this data reflects reality.