I want to say something briefly this morning about the current situation in theUnited Kingdom. The subject of the session is national cataloguing codes. This word ‘national’ is a term that we are having to think about quite a lot at the moment in the United Kingdom. As you will know we are currently undergoing major constitutional change in the UK. There is a Scottish Parliament once again, and a Welsh Assembly in Wales, and so the definition of the word ‘national’ which until then meant ‘the whole of the UK’ is now having to be assessed again from everyone’s point of view. But on the issue of national cataloguing codes I do not think that we will see any change of view from our present position. Across the UK generally, we have been influenced by our common language with the rest of the English-speaking world – and North America in particular. We are Europeans but many of our influences over the past have derived from North America and that is certainly true in the area of cataloguing. We are also closer to Europe now – the librarians certainly if not always the politicians – and we have therefore the opportunity to take a European rather than a solely British perspective of issues when considering them in an international context. This is part of our current transition.

The influences of the past do mean, however, that our national cataloguing standards are more closely based on the adoption of North America standards than comparable European standards. For descriptive cataloguing most libraries – certainly most large ones – in the UK use the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules or AACR2, the code that is most commonly used in the English-speaking world. A conference on AACR held in Toronto in autumn 1999, attended by a large number of international delegates, debated its future and the issues that should be addressed. The debate confirmed that the current code was flexible enough to cope with material in all formats, including online information, and that it was not necessary to produce an AACR3 but an amended AACR2.

It was also strongly felt that the code should be made more truly international and that the use of the term ‘Anglo-American’ in the title should be abolished. In terms of formats the UK has been involved since 1994 with the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada to explore whether these three formats can be harmonized, in order to make the exchange of records easier to achieve. Significant progress was achieved when the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada reached agreement on the harmonization of their two formats, now known as MARC21, and substantial progress has been made on harmonization with UKMARC. There are, however, one or two issues (such as the treatment of multi-volume works in USMARC) on which the UK community still has reservations, a view also shared by some continental European countries, and it is hoped that this wider European perspective may be helpful in taking forward the discussions with the North Americans. It should be said that more and more libraries in the UK are moving from UKMARC to USMARC, often led by their choice of computer system. In the area of authority control the British Library, on behalf of the UK library community, undertook an initiative in 1993 with the Library of Congress to develop a joint Authority File through the exchange of bibliographic data, again with the objective of sharing costs. This project is called the Anglo-American Authority File (AAAF) and is still in progress. As part of this more distributed approach, a number of libraries in the UK now candidate name authority headings direct to LC’s NACO programme, and subject authorities to LC’s SACO programme. In our own case we are responsible for candidating Scottish headings and for undertaking the necessary research work to ensure that the heading can be accepted in an international standard.

We have just had great fun candidating the heading for the new Scottish Parliament. In the field of subject indexing many large libraries in the UK use Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The British Library was obliged some years ago to cease applying LCSH to its records during some years of particular financial difficulty. However, the Library has restored the use of LCSH, taking into account the strong views of other academic libraries in the UK. I would like now to touch briefly now on some of the particular trends in the cataloguing field in the UK at the present time.

1. There is a continuing drive to share cataloguing effort among libraries and to make greater use of records derived from other sources wherever possible. This transition has been going on in the UK for some years but its pace is not slackening.

The six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland now share responsibility for producing full standard records for the current publishing output of these countries in a programme called the Shared Cataloguing Programme, under a Memorandum of Agreement subscribed to by all six libraries. The records are created locally from legal deposit accessions and sent online by file transfer to the British Library, where they then form part of the British National Bibliography. So there is a trend to greater sharing of cataloguing effort through consortia, and there is also a developing view at the level of individual libraries: ‘why create your own record if you can get one from somewhere else with less effort and less expense?’

2. There is a strong emphasis on the need for greater standardization. The variety of descriptive cataloguing standards and formats that did not seem to matter very much in the past now seems a very significant factor –and often and impediment – as we begin to think more and more in terms of national and international co-operation. One of the current programmes in the UK, through an initiative of the Higher Education Funding Councils, is to test access across online catalogues through the use of Z39.50 protocols. These are called ‘clumping projects’ and there are three of them: one in Yorkshire and Humberside (RIDINGS), one in southern England (the M25 Group); and one in Scotland (CAIRNS). One of the striking results emerging from the work of the CAIRNS project is that creating a virtual union catalogue via Z39.50 has significant implications for cataloguing standards. If libraries are not using consistent cataloguing policies and inserting the necessary access points, then the results of the search will reflect this inconsistency, and the researcher looking for material across online catalogues will not get all the relevant information. One of the consequences is that cataloguing policies across libraries may have to be reassessed in order to ensure that consistent access points are added, and the real advantages for the researcher of the technical ability to create virtual union catalogues can really be achieved.

3. Another trend that continues to develop in the UK is the increasing internationalization of cataloguing, principally through the effects of automation and networking on the function of cataloguing. Staff engaged on cataloguing materials are now much more readily in touch with their counterparts not only in other libraries but also in other countries through the ease of email communication and the Internet. As a consequence cataloguing staff in one library can see more easily than used to be the case that the tasks they accomplish can make a contribution not only to their own library but potentially to national and international effort. This also acts as a stimulus to a wider consideration of cataloguing policies, the desirability of sharing records and authority control with others, and the internationalization of data through multi-lingual catalogues.

4. Another very significant priority in the UK at present is a strong emphasis on the desirability of better access for researchers to collections that are either uncatalogued or are in manual catalogues requiring retroconversion or retrospective conversion. Resources to enable progress to be made in this field have been made available through the Higher Education Fundings Councils, specifically targeted at cataloguing and retroconversion. Higher Education libraries must bid for these resources competitively, and in the most recent programme which is currently being implemented specific collections in UK libraries identified by researchers as important to have accessible will be targeted. Libraries that are successful in securing these resources must undertake to catalogue them to national and international standards.

5. A further development of the emphasis on access to collections is that attention is now being made to important research collections that are housed in public libraries, with a view to finding a way of identifying them and also making them available to researchers. In the UK public libraries have had less investment in automation but the current Government has promised that public libraries will be networked by 2002 under a programme called ‘The People’s Network’. This will assist with the task of providing online access to their resources, and make it possible to provide more consistent access across a region to collections that are housed in libraries in different sectors with a view to ‘converging’ online access to materials. I should like to finish by speculating a little about the shape of ‘national’ cataloguing in the UK in the next decade as we move into the Millenium. I suggest that the following elements will be an important part of UK strategy:

1. We will continue to co-operate with North America in the area of descriptive cataloguing and authority control.
2. We will co-operate more effectively with our colleagues in continental European libraries.
3. We will continue to share more records with one another, where this is possible, and technology will continue to assist us to move further in the direction of not cataloguing material ourselves if we can use records created by another library or utility.
4. We will see increasing globalization of co-operation and of the bibliographic market.
5. We will move further in the direction of using consistent standards within our libraries in the UK in order to provide better services to researchers.

6. We will see greater co-operation between libraries and museums, archives and other stewards of materials. As we move into the Millenium our perspective in the UK is that we will live in an increasingly global world, where cataloguing at the local level will contribute to national and international level, and where the issues of standards and consistency of cataloguing will be increasingly important. But this will have to be matched with a clear understanding that the global world is infinitely wider than the English-speaking world, and that making information available to researchers in this global world must be predicated upon this reality. In the UK we do not yet know what the definition of ‘national’ in constitutional terms may be in ten years’ time, but we certainly do know that in the field of cataloguing ‘national’, however it is defined, must also be international.

Homepage AIB-WEB | Homepage Congresso 1999 |