ABSTRACT

It has been said the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) were written largely for a print, monograph world and that the descriptive bibliographic standards for serials and for other physical formats are variations on those basic standards. If that is too strong a statement, one can at least say that there are certain principles, such as:

• transcription from an item can serve as the basis for bibliographic identification;

• sources of bibliographic information can be consistently identified on an item; and

These principles work relatively well for static, monographic items and have been applied to the cataloging of materials in all formats.