Cataloging News

I found out Wednesday that the cataloging rules that were established in 1978 (AACR2) are being rethought. The news rules entitled, RDA, might soon replace the Anglo American Cataloging Rules. The need for a change comes from the rapid advancement of technology and the need to make catalogs more patron friendly and not so intimidating. Also as the world becomes more interconnected it is felt that the current rules are too Western centric. I will have to look at this more.

One session detailed how we could integrate barcodes into a bibliographic report using special fonts. This would allow us to print off a list of books and then scan the item IDs instead of typing them. If this works for us it would be especially useful for inventory and database cleanup.