The Formats and Norms of Cataloguing: Evolution and Perspective

The Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules gave rise to the holding of a conference which took place in Toronto, Canada, in October 1997. A certain number of contributors there elaborated on prepared texts about precise points concerning the evolution of rules in general, and those of the AACR in particular. The evolution of the notion of the catalogue and that of the practice of cataloguing were at the centre of contributions and debates which took place in an electronic forum put in place specially for the occasion. The hypertext navigation within the body of catalogues or documents, the creation of "metadata" included in the electronic documents themselves, the evolution of the notion of authority, the advent of a set of universal characters permitting liberation from the problems of transliteration, were some of the points debated, and are here synthesized.
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