Recent Trends in Library Cataloguing

      Cataloguing is the core of every library, a basic tool of retrieval in any document collection. The word‘ Catalogue’ has been derived from the Greek expression ‘Kata-Logos’. It means a list, register or complete enumeration of something. The list can be books, maps or other items arranged in definite systematic order in a library.

            The history of cataloguing is indeed a fascinating area of study. The seventh century BCE Babylonian Library of Asurbanipal was led by the librarian Ibnissaru who prescribed a catalogue of clay tablets by subject. The 16^th century proved a productive period influenced by great bibliographers like Gesner, Treflerus, Maunsell etc. As librarian Gottfried van Swieten introduced the world first card catalogue (1780) as the Perfect of the Imperial Library , Austria. The 19^th Century marks the beginning of Code making. Among them some are :

•         British Museaum Cataloguing Rules which is also known as Panizzis 91 rules (1841)
•          Cutter’s Rules : Charles Ammi Cutter published “Rules for a Dictionay Catalogue in           1876 which considered as “ Landmark Work”in the history of cataloguing code
•          Classified Catalogue Code : Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan  published the first                 Indian Library Code (CCC) in 1934. The code marked for its simplicity, clarity, and           brevity.

 AACR & ISBD :

An International Conference, the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles (ICCP) held in Paris in 1961, which asserted the importance of drawing up a code of rules based on sound theoretical principles rather than on ad hoc solutions to practical problems. This led to the production of the Anglo-American Cataloguing rules in 1967 in two different versions: the British text and the American text After some major revision AACR2 published in 1978 and AACR-2R appeared in 1988. One of the areas that needed urgent attention for standardization was the area of description of items. In 1969 IFLA sponsored an international meeting of cataloguing experts at Copenhagen which led, in 1971, to the publication of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD). This was further developed for various non-book materials, leading to the publication in 1977 of a generalized version of ISBD, called ISBD(G). The ISBD defines nine areas of description. Each area, except area 7, is composed of multiple elements with structured classifications.

0: Content form and media type area

1: Title and statement of responsibility area, consisting of

1.1 Title proper

1.2 Parallel title

1.3 Other title information

1.4 Statement of responsibility

2: Edition area

3: Material or type of resource specific area (e.g., the scale of a map or the numbering of a periodical)

4: Publication, production, distribution, etc., area

5: Material description area (e.g., number of pages in a book or number of CDs issued as a unit)

6: Series area

7: Notes area

8: Resource identifier and terms of availability area (e.g., ISBN, ISSN)

OPAC:

One of the most significant developments has been emergence of the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) which is basically the gateway to a library's collection. This is an interface through which users can search a library's catalogue, and can also perform a number of other operations, such as borrower record checking, reservation of items, online renewal, and so on. Although OPACs made their first appearance in the mid-1970s, it was only at the beginning of the next decade that libraries in significant numbers began to switch from card to automated catalogues. The four major component of OPAC are :

• The user interface allows a user to interact with the system.
• The main catalogue database file is something like the card catalogues, each card being converted into a bibliographic record.
• The index file, called the inverted file, which may be conceived as a back-of-thebook index file containing all the index terms (here, authors name, title words or full titles, keywords, subject headings, and so on) and appropriate pointers pointing to appropriate record(s) in the catalogue database.
• The display/print format directly relates to cataloguing and to AACR2.

STANDARDS FOR CATALOGUING

There are basically two types of standards used in cataloguing. The first one is the International Standard ISO 2709, or its equivalent national standard. The second set of standards relates to the content designators which are represented in most bibliographic formats by tags, indicators and subfield codes. MARC was the first such standard, though now there are several such standards and many of them come from the MARC family, viz. AUSMARC, UKMARC, INDIMARC, UNIMARC, and so on.

CATALOGUING NETWORKS

The United States led the world in setting up cataloguing networks and bibliographic utilities such as OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) and WLN (Western Library Network). Among these OCLC is the pioneer and is the most highly used bibliographic utility service. OCLC, the world's largest library information network, offers the following services that help libraries further access to information and reduce information costs:

·         WorldCat (the OCLC Online Union Catalog)

·         The OCLC system

·         OCLC FirstSearch® service

·         OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online® service

·         OCLC Access Services.

 CATALOGUING AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Nowadays the ever-expanding growth of information and information technology, increasing volumes and multiple formats of information, changing user expectations and behaviours brought about even higher levels of challenges for cataloguers. To pursue professional ethics in creating timely and high quality records, cataloguers need to develop a new mindset to deal with the increased complexity in cataloguing. Cataloguing of Internet resources can be done by using a set of tools called ROADS. ROADS stands for Resource Organization And Discovery in Subject-based services. It is a set of software tools designed to help create information gateways on the Internet. ROADS allows Internet resources to be fully described, allowing the end user to judge their relevancy before trying to access them and it is properly organized. The organization and description of resources adds value to an information gateway. ROADS allows you to create a database of resource descriptions (also called templates). New technologies require new skills. The modern cataloguer has to be multi-skilled, computer literate, able to operate different in house library systems, able to use the online packages, such as MARC21 standard online, WEB Dewey, Web LC, Search interfaces.

RDA

Since mid-2010, Resource Description and Access (RDA) have been introduced as an alternative to past cataloguing practices for the electronic environment. RDA is built on the traditions of the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) recognized during the 1990s that AACR2 was not a code that would serve 21^st century users. It was structured around card catalogs and linear displays of citations, and well-formed metadata that could be used by computer systems. RDA will provide a set of guidelines and instructions on formulating descriptive data and access point control data to support resource discovery. Being developed as a web based product RDA is especially designed for description and access for digital resources. An important feature of RDA will be its independence from the presentation of data. It will provide guidance on the recording of data, the content, and not on how it might be organized on the screen. That means that RDA-based cataloguing can be readily accommodated in many other than MARC encoding standards and metadata schema, thus intended to be independent of any cataloguing code. As a result, the more user-friendly presentations of bibliographic data can be introduced.

FRBR

From 1992-1995 the IFLA ( International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions ) Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) developed an entity-relationship model as a generalized view of the bibliographic universe, intended to be independent of any cataloging code or implementation. It represents a more holistic approach to retrieval and access as the relationships between the entities provide links to navigate through the hierarchy of relationships. 

FRBR comprises groups of entities:

·     Group 1 entities are defined as the products of intellectual or artistic endeavours that are named or described in bibliographic records: work, expression, manifestation, and item.

·   Group 2 entities are those responsible for the intellectual or artistic content, the physical production and dissemination, or the custodianship of the Group 1 entities: person, corporate body, and family2

·   Group 3 entities represent an additional set of entities that serve as the subjects of works: concept, object, event, and place.

Group 1 entities are the foundation of the FRBR model:

• Work is a "distinct intellectual or artistic creation.
• Expression is "the specific intellectual or artistic form that a work takes each time it is  'realized.'"
• Manifestation is "the physical embodiment of an expression of a work. As an entity, manifestation represents all the physical objects that bear the same characteristics, in respect to both intellectual content and physical form."
• Item is "a single exemplar of a manifestation. The entity defined as item is a concrete entity."[2] Each copy of the 1996 pressings of that 1996 recording is an item. When we say, "Both copies of the London Philharmonic's 1996 performance of the Ninth are checked out of my local library," we are generally referring to items

FRBR outlines the relationship between many different interpretations or expressions of the work. Each expression can be published in various formats or manifestations. Each manifestation may be reproduced many times, each of which is called an item. Thus, FRBR is a conceptual entity-relationship model. (ER-model)

Relationship :

FRBR is built upon relationships between and among entities. "Relationships serve as the vehicle for depicting the link between one entity and another, and thus as the means of assisting the user to ‘navigate’ the universe that is represented in a bibliography, catalogue, or bibliographic database”.

·        Equivalence relationships : Equivalence relationships exist between exact copies of the same manifestation of a work or between an original item and reproductions of it, so long as the intellectual content and authorship are preserved. Examples include reproductions such as copies, issues, facsimiles and reprints, photocopies, and microfilms.

• Derivative relationships : Derivative relationships exist between a bibliographic work and a modification based on the work. Examples include

1. Editions, versions, translations, summaries, abstracts, and digests

2.  Adaptations that become new works but are based on old works

3.  Genre changes

4.    New works based on the style or thematic content of the work

·     Descriptive relationships : Descriptive relationships exist between a bibliographic entity and a description, criticism, evaluation, or review of that entity, such as between a work and a book review describing it.

FRAD and FRSAD 

    Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), formerly known as Functional Requirements for Authority Records (FRAR) is a conceptual entity-relationship model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) for relating the data that are recorded in library authority records to the needs of the users of those records and facilitate and sharing of that data. The Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) was established in April 1999. It was charged to continue the work of FRBR by developing a conceptual model for entities described in authority records. The primary purpose of the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) conceptual model is “to provide a framework for the analysis of functional requirements for the kind of authority data that is required to support authority control and for the international sharing of authority data. The model focuses on data, regardless of how they may be packaged (e.g., in authority records)”. The IFLA Working Group on the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR) was formed in 2005 to address subject authority data issues and to investigate the direct and indirect uses of subject authority data by a wide range of users. The FRSAR Working Group (2005 to present) and the FRANAR Working Group (1999 to 2009) both worked in parallel to develop models within the FRBR framework. By the time FRANAR released its final report in June 2009, FRSAR also had released its first draft report of the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) for world-wide review. The model is intended to support global sharing and reuse of subject authority data.

·         The conceptual model of FRSAD

Work : Work is a "distinct intellectual or artistic creation (IFLA 1998)

Thema : Is anything that can be the subject of a work. This is the abstract idea of the aboutness of a given work. Thema is independent of language and disciplines (FRSAR 2007).

Nomen : Any alphanumeric, sound, visual, or any other symbol, sign or combination of symbols by which a thema is known, referred to or addressed (FRSAR 2007).

BIBFRAME

BIBFRAME (Bibliographic Framework) is a data model for bibliographic description . In 2011, the Library of Congress (LC) began a project to end libraries isolation from the semantic web through the creation of a new communication format, called BIBFRAME “BIBFRAME Framework as a Web of Data,” 2012), as a successor to the MARC formats. The development of BIBFRAME has been a complex one as its creators try to balance the need to capture the data encoded in MARC, the constraints of RDF, and input from the community it hopes to serve. In addition, there are other schemas available for libraries’ use, such as Schema.org (“Schema.org Homepage”), the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) (“CIDOC_CRM Homepage”), and the Europeana Data Model (EDM) (“Europeana Data Model Documentation”).

Illustration of BIBFRAME 2.0 model, with three core levels of abstraction (in blue)—Work, Instance, Item—and three related classes (in orange)—Agent, Subject, Event.

 FRBRoo

This document is the definition of the object-oriented version of the FRBR1 family of conceptual models2, harmonised with CIDOC CRM, hereafter referred to as FRBRoo (FRBR-object oriented), a formal ontology that captures and represents the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and therefore facilitates the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information. The first draft of FRBRoo was completed in 2006.[2] The model expresses the attributes and relationships in the entity–relationship model of FRBR, formulated as an extensions of the CIDOC-CRM. Version 2.4 of the FRBRoo model was released in November 2015.

Conclusion

In this section we have discussed various mile stones in the study of library cataloguing. Internet, WWW, the concept of digital library have added a new dimension and growing challenges in library cataloguing. Rapid emergence of new   formats, increased rate of updates of cataloguing rules, cataloguing for diverse user environments become the result of new challenges for library cataloguing in this 21^st century. The cataloguers should invest their time for self-development and skill-improvement to fulfill the requirements of these innovations in the field of library cataloguing.

References

•        Zeng, Žumer, and Salaba, eds. (2010). Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD): A Conceptual Model

•        Tillett, Barbara. "What is FRBR?" (PDF). Library of Congress. Retrieved 5 August 2017.

•        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records#cite_ref-1

•        Van Malssen, Kara. "BIBFRAME AV Modeling Study: Defining a Flexible Model for Description of Audiovisual Resources" (PDF). Library of Congress. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 August 2014. Retrieved 1 August 2014.

•        ISBD: International Standard Bibliographic Description (PDF). IFLA series on bibliographic control. 44 (Consolidated ed.). München: K.G. Saur. 2011

•        "RDA Steering Committee". rda-rsc.org. Retrieved 2017-04-30.

•        Gorman, Michael. "RDA: The coming cataloguing debacle" (PDF). Retrieved 31 January 2011.