Principles and Evolution of Bibliographic Description

1) Explain the multidimensional scope of bibliographic description in online environment.
Online environment offers tremendous possibilities of linking activities of various groups and organisations engaged in the areas of bibliographic data management such as libraries, archives, museums, publishers, booksellers and students, researchers and academicians. Therefore, the scope of
bibliographic description should be extended to cover variety of materials; full range of physical media, all possible forms and formats, wide variety of applications and all the generic users tasks.

2) Discuss the role of ISBDs as base format for bibliographic description.
The formulation and design of ISBDs by IFLA is considered as the landmark in the development of international standards for bibliographic description. IFLA produced a vast array of standards to cover different types of bibliographic items such as monographs, serials, cartographic materials,
electronic resources and others. ISBD(G) provides a general framework for application and use of specific ISBDs. Since 1971, ISBDs are acting as base format for national and international cataloguing codes and machine-readable bibliographic formats. ISBDs also influenced the development of domain specific metadata schemas for bibliographic data management.

3) Enumerate different types of bibliographic relationships and their role in retrieval.
Bibliographic relationships are different types of associations among bibliographic entities. Such relationships help to identify and locate related items from a catalogue or bibliographic database against search for bibliographical entities. In short, they support collocating functions. Modern
research identified following types of bibliographic relationships: equivalence relationships (between original and copies or reproduction); derivative (between original and modified versions of it); descriptive (between original and evaluated versions of it); whole-part (between an item and its part or whole); accompanying (between bibliographic item and accompanies of it); sequential (between items that continue or precede one another); and shared characteristics (common authorship, title, etc.)

4) What do you mean by Principle? Evaluate the Principles of bibliographic description as formulated by JSC.
 A principle is a proposition that acts as the basis for deriving rules of procedure by the application of reasoning. The JSC for Revision of AACR, a body operating under Canadian Library Association, proposed a set of principles for bibliographic description on the basis of works of various stalwarts likes Ranganathan, Leibniz and Svenonius. These principles are grouped into two categories – general design principles and bibliographic description and access. The principles in the first group advocate that the general design of bibliographic format or catalogue code should be based on strong reasoning and should prefer the most economic alternative. The principles in the second group direct to include standard, normalised and bibliographically significant elements of description and access. They also prescribe to follow a common set of rules to achieve user convenience.

5) Explain the importance of mapping bibliographic data elements to the user tasks.
Users of bibliographic data exercise four generic tasks to reach to their object of interest. The highest principle of bibliographic description is user convenience. This core principle suggests covering those bibliographically significant data elements, which will satisfy all the generic user tasks, namely
find, identify, select and obtain. Therefore, mapping of bibliographic data elements to the user tasks by indicating the degree of relevance or relative values of data elements will certainly measure the usefulness of any bibliographic standard, cataloguing code or bibliographic format.

KEYWORDS
Cataloguing Codes : A set of rules for preparing bibliographic records for use in catalogues and bibliographies. Generally, such codes concentrate on bibliographic description and choice and form of access points.
Descriptive Metadata : Metadata that describes a work for purposes of discovery and identification, such as creator, title, and subject.
FRBR : Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
GARE : It stands for Guidelines for Authority and Reference Entries. It is a standard developed by IFLA to manage encoding of authority data and reference entries.
GILS : Global Information Locator Service.
GSARE : It is a standard to set Guidelines for Subject Authority and Reference Entries. Metadata Harvesting : A technique for extracting metadata from individual repositories and collecting it in a central catalogue to facilitate search inter-operability.
Metadata Schema : A metadata element set and rules for using it.
ONIX : Online Information Exchange International.
UKOLN : United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking.
UBC : Universal Bibliographic Control Programme of IFLA.
UBCIM : Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Programme of IFLA.
UKOLN : United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking.
XML : Extensible Mark-up Language, a subset of SGML gaining currency in Web applications.
XOBIS : An Experimental Schema for Unifying Bibliographic and Authority Records.
Z39.50 : A NISO and ISO standard protocol for crosssystem search and retrieval. Officially, International Standard, ISO 23950: “Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification” and ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995.

Source: IGNOU Study Material