Draft From An IFLA Working Group: "Guidelines for Subject Access in National Bibliographies"

“Guidelines for Subject Access in National Bibliographies”
IFLA Working Group on Guidelines for Subject Access by National Bibliographic Agencies
Draft May 2011 for Worldwide Review

From the Preface:

The Working Group on Guidelines for Subject Access by National Bibliographic Agencies has existed since 2003. Participants in this group included various providers of information — subject librarians, terminology managers, bibliography specialists, LIS teachers and others. In 2005 we discussed the scope of our tasks and decided to recommend subject access for national bibliographies as part of the production of bibliographies in general. National bibliographies have been in a state of change with many countries starting to publish their national bibliographies online. The question of how to integrate the multitude of national online resources needs to be considered, how they should be catalogued, how they should be made accessible, and how they could be discovered by bibliography users. Because the Working Group on Guidelines for National Bibliographies of the IFLA Bibliography Section was concerned with exactly these „new directions”, we decided to build our guidelines on their recommendations, published in 2009 under the title National Bibliographies in the Digital Age: Guidance and New Directions. Our guidelines can be understood as a supplement to the 2009 Guidelines. Our work is also an appeal to the producers of national bibliographies to provide subject access in national bibliographies. Users will benefit from using well organized subject structures of classification systems and subject headings to expand their ways of reaching the resources they want.

Direct to the Full Text Draft (95 pages; PDF)

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