Cataloging Principles

Objectives of the Catalog

Principles of Description

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)

Cataloging principles are concepts judged to be common to all domains of metadata and should inform the design of any cataloging system. The basic principle of cataloging description is that bibliographic entities are most usefully identified by the information that is contained within the entities themselves. Therefore, a bibliographic description is constructed by transcribing information from prominent sources within the item, such as from the title page of a book or the title screen and credits from a motion picture or television program. In addition, considerable attention is paid in cataloging rules and practices to distinguishing among entities with similar attributes, such as various manifestations of the same work.

Cataloging principles emerged largely from the works of Panizzi, Cutter, and Lubetzky. Despite their significant contributions, the fundamental principles that these men developed have never been explicitly stated in the Anglo-American cataloging rules. Instead they appear in the bibliographic literature and are understood through practice.

Objectives of the Catalog

Objectives are different from principles in that principles inform systems design, while objectives state the desired outcomes. The fundamental objectives of the catalog as outlined by Charles Ammi Cutter in 1876 are as follows:

1. To enable a person to find a book of which either the author, the title, the subject is known
2. To show what the library has by a given author, on a given subject, in a given kind of literature
3. To assist in the choice of a book as to the edition (bibliographically), as to its character (literary or topical)

Cutter’s major contribution was that a catalog must be designed for the convenience of the user. Therefore, a catalog is more than a simple finding list or inventory of titles; it is a place to discover and collocate various editions or versions, translations, and formats for created works. The fundamental importance of bibliographic relationships is a key factor that distinguishes a catalog from other tools, such as popular Internet search engines.

Cutter’s objectives were essentially unchallenged for 75 years until 1960 when they were revised by Seymour Lubetzky to bring out the distinction between the work and its physical manifestation. Lubetzky’s modifications were largely influenced by the ideology of Antonio Panizzi, who in 1850 argued that the essential objective of a system for organization is to differentiate among the various editions of a work.

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Principles of Description

Cataloging principles guide the organization of information, rather than prescribe to a compartmentalized approach. Based on the objectives of the catalog outlined by Cutter and Lubetzky, Elaine Svenonius defined a core set of descriptive principles in her important work, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (2000):

1. Principle of user convenience. Decisions taken in the making of descriptions and controlled forms of names for access should be made with the user in mind.
2. Principle of common usage. Normalized vocabulary used in descriptions and access should accord with that of the majority of users.
3. Principle of representation. Descriptions and controlled forms of names for access should be based on the way an information entity describes itself.
4. Principle of accuracy. Descriptions and controlled forms of names for access should faithfully portray the entity described.
5. Principle of sufficiency and necessity. Descriptions and controlled forms of names for access should include only those elements that are bibliographically significant.
6. Principle of standardization. Descriptions and controlled forms of names for access should be standardized, to the extent and level possible.
7. Principle of integration. Descriptions for all types of materials should be based on a common set of rules, to the extent possible.

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Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)

In order to assess the relationship between metadata and traditional cataloging data, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) developed a conceptual model in the late 1990s based on the following four user tasks:

1. Allow a user seeking a particular work to do so using search criteria that encompasses both the creator of the work and the work itself (“to find entities that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria”).
2. Take the user’s search and match creator terms against authority records for names, as well as title terms against authority records for works, so as to pick up any name or title variants for or changed names or titles the user may have used in her search (“to identify an entity”);
3. Produce a list of all expressions of the work with separate lists of works about the work and other related works, so that a user can be free to make her own decisions about which expression and manifestation is of interest, and whether or not works about the work or related works might be of interest (“to select an entity that is appropriate to the user’s needs”);
4. Allow a user to acquire the resource by ways determined by the entity’s owner, custodian, or provider, whether that is to travel to the repository or to view a surrogate of the entity online (“to obtain a copy of a selected entity”).

These primary user tasks became the foundation behind IFLA’s 1998 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records where:

1. A work is a distinct intellectual or artistic creation;
2. An expression is the intellectual or artistic creation of a work;
3. A manifestation is the physical embodiment of an expression of a work;
4. An item is a single exemplar of a manifestation.

FRBR is a framework for commonly shared understanding. It allows comparison of data that may not be structured in the same way and is a way of defining relationships between works, their creators, and their subjects.

The FRBR conceptual model is shaping the ways catalogs are currently being designed to better accommodate the explosion of various formats and emerging metadata.

The Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service has put out a pamphlet titled What is FRBR?

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