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Cataloguing Section

ISBD Review Group

Announcements

The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) – preliminary consolidated edition has been published by K.G. Saur.  It was presented at the World Library and Information Congress in Durban, South Africa, in August 2007.

Objectives

The main objective of the ISBD Review Group is to maintain the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), which is intended to serve as a principal standard to promote universal bibliographic control, to make universally and promptly available, in a form that is internationally acceptable, basic bibliographic data for all published resources in all countries. The ISBD's main goal is, and has been since the very beginning, to offer consistency when sharing bibliographic information.

In the ISBD, national bibliographic agencies are called upon to "prepare the definitive description containing all the mandatory elements set out in the ISBD insofar as the information is applicable to the resource being described." This practice is also recommended for application by libraries that share bibliographic data with each other. Each data element is designated by one of the following attributes:

  • Mandatory: the element is required in all situations if applicable.
  • Conditional: the element is required under certain conditions, such as "when necessary for identification or otherwise considered important to users of the catalogue". If the condition is not met, use of the element is optional.
  • Optional: the element may be included or omitted at the discretion of the agency.

In the ISBD, a review of the Outline (provided at paragraph 0.3) indicates which data elements are mandatory, conditional, or optional.

The ISBD Review Group's activities are supported by ICABS, the IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Bibliographic Standards, and more specifically by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, one of the partners of the ICABS Program.

Origins of the ISBD

The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) dates back to 1969, when the IFLA Committee on Cataloguing (subsequently renamed the Standing Committee of the IFLA Section on Cataloguing, now known as the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section) sponsored an International Meeting of Cataloguing Experts. This meeting produced a resolution that proposed creation of standards to regularize the form and content of bibliographic descriptions. As a result, the Committee on Cataloguing put into motion work that ultimately would provide the means for a considerable increase in the sharing and exchange of bibliographic data. This work resulted in the concept of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), which has now endured for more than 30 years. The individual formats to which the ISBD concept has been applied are now used by bibliographic agencies, national and multinational cataloguing codes, and cataloguers in a wide variety of libraries throughout the world, because of their potential for promoting record sharing.

The first of the ISBDs was the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Monographic Publications (ISBD(M)), which appeared in 1971. By 1973, this text had been adopted by a number of national bibliographies and, with translations of the original English text into several other languages, had been taken into account by a number of cataloguing committees in redrafting national rules for description. Comments from users of the ISBD(M) led to the decision to produce a revised text that was published in 1974 as the "First standard edition."

In 1975, the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules proposed to the IFLA Committee on Cataloguing that a general international standard bibliographic description suitable for most common types of library resources should be developed. The ISBD(G), published in 1977, was the result. The ISBD(M) was then revised to bring it into line with the ISBD(G), and the "First standard edition revised" was published in 1978.

An ISBD Review Committee was formed by the Standing Committee of the IFLA Section on Cataloguing, and it met in 1981 to make plans for reviewing and revising the ISBDs covering monographic publications, serials, cartographic materials, and non-book materials. There were three major objectives set out for this project: (1) to harmonize provisions among the ISBDs, achieving increased consistency; (2) to improve examples; and (3) to make the provisions more applicable to cataloguers working with materials published in non-roman scripts. In addition, two narrower objectives motivated this particular revision effort: (a) to review the use of the equals sign; and (b) to consider proposals regarding the ISBD(NBM) emanating from specialist groups such as the International Association of Music Librarians (most prominent of which was to remove "machine-readable data files" as a format from this standard). By the end of the 1980s, this project had been completed.

ISBD and FRBR

In the early 1990s, the IFLA Section on Cataloguing with the cooperation of the Section on Classification and Indexing set up the IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). One immediate consequence of this development was the decision to suspend most revision work on the ISBDs while the FRBR Study Group pursued its charge to "recommend a basic level of functionality and basic data requirements for records created by national bibliographic agencies." In 1998, the FRBR Study Group published its Final Report after its recommendations were approved by the IFLA Section on Cataloguing's Standing Committee. At that time the ISBD Review Group was reconstituted to resume its traditional work. As expected, the IFLA Section on Cataloguing's Standing Committee asked the ISBD Review Group to initiate a full-scale review of the ISBDs. The objective of this "second general review project" was to ensure conformity between the provisions of the ISBDs and FRBR's data requirements for the "basic level national bibliographic record." It also involved a mapping between ISBD elements and FRBR attributes and relationships, developed by Tom Delsey in 2004.

Therefore, the main task in pursuing the second general review has entailed a close examination of the ISBD data elements to make optional those that are also optional in FRBR. In no case is a data element mandatory in FRBR but optional in the ISBDs. Despite the changes introduced by the revision projects summarized above, the essential structure and data components of the ISBDs have proved relatively stable over the years and continue to be widely used in full or part by creators of cataloguing codes and metadata schemes.

Starting in 2003, a consolidated ISBD was developed to merge the seven specialized ISBDs into one. The preliminary consolidated edition was published in loose-leaf format in the summer of 2007.  The first update is anticipated in 2009.

Structure

Roster

Current working groups

Former working groups

Reports on activities and meetings

In addition to the work mentioned above, the ISBD Review Group is always engaged in a variety of related activities and projects which are reported to the Cataloguing Section.

Further reading

John Byrum. The birth and re-birth of the ISBDs: process and procedures for creating and revising the International Standard Bibliographic Descriptions, presented to the 66th IFLA Annual Conference (August 2000)

John Byrum. IFLA's ISBD Programme: Purpose, Process, and Prospects, presented to the Second IFLA Meeting of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code (August 2004).