The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR)

The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules is a set of rules that were written to provide guidance to many libraries in many different countries.  Canada, United States, Great Britain, and Australia follow these rules as a way of sharing resources, providing consistent coding of materials, and as a source when making important decisions.  The AACR2R has 11 chapters for different information resources and materials with each chapter having 8 areas of description.

Chapter 1 – General rules that cover all chapters from 2- 12.

Chapter 2 – Books, pamphlets, and printed sheets

Chapter 3 – Cartographic materials

Chapter 4 – Manuscripts

Chapter 5 – Music

Chapter 6 – Sound recordings

Chapter 7 – Motion pictures and videorecordings

Chapter 8 – Graphic materials

Chapter 9 – Electronic resources

Chapter 10 – Three-dimensional artefacts and realia

Chapter 11 – Microforms

Chapter 12 – Continuing resources

MAchine Readable Cataloguing

Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) is an international standard that is used to create computerized bibliographic records.  These records are shared amongst other libraries by “copy cataloguing”.  MARC uses descriptive elements of an item such as the title, author, physical characteristics, etc., into a code that online library databases can recognize and convert into data that can be understood by users.  We use MARC21 which is a combination of Canadian MARC and USMARC.  The official site can be found at http://www.loc.gov/marc/ .

MARC Structure

Field – An area of description

Tag – a three digit symbol that represents each field

            Tags by area of description:

                        245 - Title and Statement of Responsibility

                        250 - Edition Area

                        260 - Publication, Distribution, etc

                        300 - Physical Description

                        5XX - Note Area

                        0XX - Standard Numbers

Indicators – follow and define each tag.   It is important that Indicator positions be recorded accurately in order to provide accurate search results.

Sub-tag – used to separate each element within each field and are represented by letters (a, b, c, d, e)

Delimiter – a symbol that us used to designate a sub-tag usually a dollar sign ($a, $b)

LIBR1005 - Descriptive Cataloguing I

The goal of LIBR1005 is to introduce us to Descriptive Cataloguing by teaching us how to prepare an original catalogue record using Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) and following the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) as our guide.  As I understand it, original cataloguing is the process of preparing a bibliographic record from scratch without the aid of a pre-existing record of the material or resource being catalogued.  This makes me think that original cataloguing is a time consuming process because we are creating a new record completely from scratch.  In descriptive cataloguing we study the part of cataloguing that deals with the bibliographic and physical description of a bibliographic record that is being created for use within a library.