AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2. edition)

The American Library Association and the Library Association (UK) formally agreed to co-operate in 1904 about cataloging rules. The first international cataloguing code was published in 1908 in an American edition and a British edition. Both editions contained 174 rules covering both entry and heading for authors and titles, and description. Areas of disagreement between the two editions centered on authors and publications that changed names or titles.

In 1967 two versions of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) were published, a North American text and a British text.

The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second edition (AACR2) was published in one version in 1978. The Latest version of the AACR2 has been published in 2002.

Luk (1996) is an empirical study from the users' point of view concerning what bibliographical dataelements to display in OPAC's and how to display them, which suggests a modification of the AACR2.

"Initially, RDA was envisioned as a third edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, and was accordingly called AACR3, but in an effort to emphasize the break from the past it was renamed to Resource Description and Access (RDA)" (Coyle & Hillman, 2007)

Literature:

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules / prepared under the direction of the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, a committee of the American Library Association, the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, the British Library, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, the Library of Congress. – 2nd ed., 2002 revision. – Ottawa : Canadian Library Association ; London : Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals ; Chicago : American Library Association, 2002-

A brief history of the AACR: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/history.html

Coyle, Karen & Hillman, Diana (2007). Resource Description and Access (RDA). Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century. D-Lib Magazine, 13(1/2). Retrieved from:  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html

Luk, A. T. (1996). Evaluating Bibliographic Displays from the Users’ Point of View: A Focus Group Study. Faculty of Information Studies,  the University of Toronto. (Master thesis). http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/research/programs/displays/luk.pdf

ODLIS —Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science: Anglo-American Cataloging Rules. http://lu.com/odlis/index.cfm#anglo

http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/06/out-of-the-secret-garden-the-rdadc-initiative.html

See also: Descriptive cataloging (Lifeboat for KO).

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 03-08-2007

Home