Svensk Biblioteksförenings kommitté för katalogisering (The Swedish Library Association, Cataloguing Committee)

Gunilla Jonsson
Chair of the Cataloguing Committee 2004-02-10

Comments on the draft 2003 ISBD(G)
The Swedish rulemaking committee has had the opportunity to take part of the response from the Library of Congress Cataloging Policies and Support Office of February 10, 2004, and we agree with their views and have only very few remarks to add.

Firstly, however, we have a general, practical proposal: we would greatly appreciate if, in the future, the revised parts were highlighted in the files that go out for world wide review. The old phrasing could even be kept in the same document for easy comparison. If the ISBD review group fears this would obscure interpretation, a clean copy of the revised version could be supplied as well.

0.13 last paragraph: we agree with the recommendation to make one bibliographic record for each physical format in which a resource is available, but we don’t think that different display formats of electronic resources should be regarded as different physical formats, and they should not necessarily require a new record.

5.1 definition: we want to raise the question whether “component parts” in reference to pages or frames in 5.1 shouldn’t be replaced with another term. This is clearly a different use of the term than in Guidelines for the Application of the ISBDs to the Description of Component Parts, referred to in Appendix A, D.

Finally, we endorse the recommendation made by the CPSO that a study be conducted to determine the need to continue the ISBD prescribed punctuation. A profile/standard for XML mark-up for bibliographic description seems much more likely to be the way forward. Such a study should also give the opportunity to address the present unsatisfactory circumstance that the comma (,) and point (.) are not identifiable as prescribed punctuation, thus obscuring the cataloguer’s measures.