Bibliographic control or chaos: an agenda for national bibliographic services in the 21st century

The great irony of our present situation is that we have reached near-perfection in bibliographic control of " traditional " library materials at the same time as the advent of electronic resources is seen by some as threatening the very existence of library services—including bibliographic control. Before considering the question of " cataloguing the Web and the Internet, " it is salutary to review the great achievements of the past thirty years—in considering where we are going it is necessary to know where we have been. When the ideal of Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) was first advanced i thirty years ago, the international library community was only beginning to discern dimly the possibilities of the interconnection of international standardization and library automation. International standardization was at a very early stage (far closer to an ideal than a reality) and the ideal of each item being catalogued once in its country of origin—the resulting record being made available to the world community—seemed far from practical realization. Records were exchanged between countries (mostly between national libraries), but in the most inefficient manner possible—print on paper—and, since they resulted from different cataloguing codes and practices, were integrated into catalogues with great difficulty. The choice was between incorporating international records without alteration—something that degraded the catalogue very quickly—or doing such extensive revision (and retyping) that it would have been cheaper and quicker to catalogue the item oneself ab initio. MARC was in its infancy when UBC was proclaimed as an ideal, ii the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) was still being drafted, iii and, despite the Paris Principles, iv cataloguing rules in different countries lacked a common basis for the assignment and form of access points (" headings ") and adhered to different descriptive practices. It was, I believe, the confluence of a need (national and research libraries throughout the world needing less expensive and