A Generic Cataloguing Research Paper
Submitted by djfiander on October 28, 2003 - 11:20pm
I wrote this when I was doing an independent study paper in cataloging for my masters.
- Reiterate either the Paris principles or Cutter's objectives of the
catalogue. Make sure to reference the original publication, even though you've never actually seen a copy of it. - Describe the relationship between the set provided and the other. Again, make sure to reference the primary documents.
- Lament the fact that the rules were created for a 5x3-index-card
world. If you're Canadian, note that the cards were actually metric. - Propose a "radical" revision of the rules that includes at least one
of- Eliminating the main entry (provide a definition of it)
- restructuring the catalogue to focus on "the abstract work" rather than "the manifestation"
- linking every record in the catalogue to every other record
- creating a shared catalogue that allows the user to discover the perfect book in a rural library in Lesser Mongolia, which library does not participate in the local consortium's ILL service.
- discarding MARC bibliographic markup and replacing with a new network-ready, vendor-neutral, tagged, structured data encoding system
- Eliminating the main entry (provide a definition of it)
- Conclude with the statement that "it will take some work" but that the benefits outweigh the costs.
I then proceeded to write a paper that follows about half of my own suggestions.

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