Cataloging System

Cataloging is the process of creating and maintaining bibliographic and authority records in the library catalog, the database of books, serials, sound recordings, moving images, cartographic materials, computer files, e-resources etc. that are owned by a library. The catalog may be in tangible form, such as a card catalog or in electronic form, such as online public access catalog (OPAC). Relative to the movement of materials within technical services, cataloging usually follows the receipt of ordered books in acquisitions. The process of cataloging involves three major activities, namely, Descriptive Cataloging, Subject Cataloging, and Authority Control. Cataloging is a subset of the larger field called information organization.

Descriptive Cataloguing includes recording the attributes of a library item, such as the name of author(s), contributor(s), title, edition, publisher, distributor, date, the number of pages, its size, name of series, etc. Descriptive Cataloging enables the user to find and identify a book, by the name of the author, the title, variant titles, etc. Two popular standards for Descriptive Cataloging are Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) and its successor Resource Description and Access (RDA). The Classified Catalogue Code (CCC) is also a user-oriented code that provides rules for subject entries and exhaustive rules for choice and rendering of bibliographic items for descriptive cataloging.

Subject Cataloguing involves the subject analysis of the resource and providing corresponding subject headings from a controlled vocabulary or subject heading list, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Medical Subject Headings (MESH) and assignment of classification numbers using schemes such as Library of Congress Classification (LCC) or Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC).

MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) standards are a set of digital formats for the description of items catalogued by libraries, such as books. MARC 21 was designed to redefine the original MARC record format for the 21st century and to make it more accessible to the international community. MARC 21 has formats for the following five types of data: Bibliographic Format, Authority Format, Holdings Format, Community Format, and Classification Data Format.

Handbook for AACR2

Classified-Catalogue-Code (CCC)5th Ed.

MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data