Page 45 - Cataloging and Classification for Library Technicians, 2nd Edition

30 Cataloging and Classification for Library Technicians
these rules. Al though many changes were made in the second edi tion,
published in 1978, it was not un til 1981 that li braries to tally adopted
these new rules. The re vised sec ond edi tion was pub lished in 1988,
and again re vised in 1998. This latest edi tion is the appropriate one to
use and is the one dis cussed in this chap ter. No fun damental or philo-
sophical changes oc curred in the 1998 edition.
Let us now look at AACR2R. As a li brary tech nician, you will be do -
ing copy cat a log ing most of the time. You will be re trieving needed in -
formation from a computer da tabase or printed sources in or der to
complete your cataloging tasks. In the oc casional case when you can not
find the ma terial al ready cat aloged by some one else, you will need to
perform orig inal cat aloging, which means that you must de termine the
information needed by technically reading the item you are cataloging.
Technical read ing means that you would look at the ti tle page, the copy -
right page, and the ta ble of con tents and per haps read a little bit into the
chapters to de termine the sub ject matter of the book and to get all the
necessary in formation. You need to know ex actly how the information
is or ganized to transfer that in formation onto cards or to enter the in for-
mation into the com puter da tabase, if your li brary has on line cataloging.
AACR2R spells out the rules for per forming this task.
Besides the print edition, AACR2R is also avail able elec tron i cally
on a CD-ROM ti tled AACR2R-e, and is in cluded on an other CD-
ROM ver sion, Cat a loger’s Desk top, together with some other pub li-
cations that are used as ref erences in cataloging. Al though you need
not mem orize all of the rules in AACR2R, it is nec essary to fa miliar-
ize your self with the ba sic rules, those which will be used daily when
cataloging ma terials. For the more spe cialized rules, you need to
know that they ex ist, and how to find the ex act rule that ap plies to
your case, ei ther through the table of con tents or the in dex.
In this chap ter, the more ba sic rules listed in AACR2R are ex plained.
Keep in mind that these are only some of the rules. For more spe cialized,
less fre quently used rules, AACR2R should be con sulted di rectly. Any
book on the sub ject of cataloging is not a sub stitute for AACR2R, and as
a mem ber of the cat aloging staff, you must ac quire a copy of the lat est
edition of AACR2R, which is the 1998 re vision, as your sourcebook.