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63rd IFLA General Conference - Conference Programme and Proceedings - August 31- September 5, 1997

IFLA Section on Cataloguing
Annual report 1996/1997

Suzanne Jouguelet
Secretary of the Section


Since the IFLA conference in Beijing, where the section organized an open programme oriented towards cooperative cataloguing, a workshop on " retroconversion : lessons learned and new trends ", and had two fruitful meetings of the standing committee, the work of the officers of the section, with the help of some members of the standing committee has been devoted to different actions :

We prepared and adopted in Beijing our scope statement.

We also elaborated a preliminary list of our goals, which we have worked upon since that time. We have prepared a draft version of the action plan, based on these goals. The idea is to get for each goal one or two actions that can be measured and evaluated every year.

All these texts will be discussed at our standing committee meetings in Copenhagen. It is an important step as it gives the direction of the section's work for four years.

We shall submit a draft to the Coordinating Board of the Division for Bibliographic Control, which meets in Washington on May 9.

Section's projects

Working Group on Functional requirements for bibliographic records

The study has elaborated a conceptual model of the bibliographic universe (entities, attributes, relationships between them) and examined the functions of bibliographic records. The data elements have been checked according to different types of documents.

A six month world wide review for comments took place until the end of November 1996 ; the study group met in Washington mid February 1997 to review the draft report based upon the world-wide review (forty responses), and prepare the final report for the Copenhagen Conference. If the report is approved by the standing committee, that committee will make the decisions with the Division of Bibliographic Control and the IFLA UBCIM Office as to what the next steps will be for its publication, dissemination, and implementation.

ISBD (CF) review group

The new version of the ISBD for computer files to take into account the electronic resources, ISBD (ER) is at its final stage, after the synthesis of the world wide review.

The final version has been delivered to the UBCIM office which will handle the balloting by the members of the standing committees that are responsible for the project. If approved, the text will be published by K.G Saur later this year.

Anonymous classics

The first phase (European countries) is nearly completed, the second phase will cover countries from Asia and Latin America.

Working Group on Form and structure of corporate headings

In Beijing the group defined nine areas to study more precisely for updating : conferences, corporate and geographical names, acronyms, corporate bodies with personal names, language of qualifiers, cross references, religious bodies, translitterations schemes. A draft was distributed in December 1996 ; working group members made comments during this spring. There will be an open working group meeting in Copenhagen.

- Section members participated on the working group on " Minimal level authority records and International standard authority data number " under UBCIM sponsorship.

Proposed study of OPACs : Guidelines for OPAC displays.

This is divisional project, in which the section on cataloguing is particularly active. After a first, large proposal was made to the Professionnal Board in December 95, we decided in Beijing to prepare a new project, broken into phases, over two years.

The aim is to produce guidelines or recommendations for a corpus of good pratice to assist libraries to design or re-design their OPACs from the display point of view.


The work on our new Medium Term Programme, the theme chosen for our open programme in Copenhagen, the move from ISBD (CF) to ISBD (ER), all this shows that our section is aware of and is responding to the challenges of cataloguing in a changing environment.

One of our goals for 1998-2001 is to provide leadership in defining the role of the cataloguing activity and of the cataloguer in particular, given the rapid developments in electronic information technology.

We desire very much in this exciting period to receive many contributions from different points of view and different countries.