The IFLA Cataloguing Section’s Working Group on ICP invites you to review the proposed updated text for Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (ICP) before final approval and publication by IFLA.

The principles intend to guide the development of cataloguing codes and the decisions that cataloguers make. They apply to bibliographic and authority data, and consequently to current library catalogues, bibliographies and other datasets created by libraries. They aim to provide a consistent approach to descriptive and subject cataloguing of bibliographic resources of all kinds.

IFLA originally produced and published the ICP in 2009. The current version has been reviewed and updated in 2014 and 2015 and takes into consideration new categories of users, the open access issue, the interoperability and the accessibility of data, and features of discovery tools.

The ICP takes into consideration the entities, attributes, and relationships as defined in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD). Since these conceptual models are currently undergoing a consolidation process, in this 2015 edition are listed all the entities described in the aforementioned conceptual models, despite some inconsistencies, especially about Group 3. Next revision will incorporate the consolidated entities.

Furthermore, the glossary has not yet been compilated since the Working Group has decided to wait for the final text in order to create it.

Please send your comments to the chair of the Cataloguing Section, Hanne Hørl Hansen (hah@dbc.dk) until June 1, 2015.