The FRBR Blog

The final draft of IFLA’s Statement of International Cataloguing Principles is now up on IFLA’s web site. (It was up in a temporary location for a little while.) Comments are welcome until the end of June.

The Statement of Principles – commonly known as the “Paris Principles” – was approved by
the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in 1961. Its goal of serving as a basis
for international standardization in cataloguing has certainly been achieved: most of the
cataloguing codes that were developed worldwide since that time followed the Principles
strictly, or at least to a high degree.

Over forty years later, having a common set of international cataloguing principles has become
even more desirable as cataloguers and their clients use OPACs (Online Public Access
Catalogues) around the world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, an effort has been
made by IFLA to adapt the Paris Principles to objectives that are applicable to online library
catalogues and beyond. The first of these objectives is to serve the convenience of the users of
the catalogue.

… These new principles build on the great cataloguing traditions of the world, and also on the
conceptual models of the IFLA documents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
(FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), which extend the Paris
Principles to the realm of subject cataloguing.

(I talk a bit about this in FRBR and the History of Cataloguing, written when the principles were in an earlier draft.)