Adoption of internationally approved standards and principles is crucial for NBAs responsible for disseminating bibliographic records for national and international exchange. Such bibliographic standards include:

  • Cataloguing rules
  • Metadata formats
  • Authority control
  • Classification schemes
  • Identifiers
  • Script conversion
  • Character sets.

National libraries have long advocated standardisation of exchange formats, cataloguing rules and communication protocols as an extension of the IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) programme.