CATALOGING WITH AACR2R AND MARC21

For Books, Electronic Resources, Sound Recordings, Videorecordings, and Serials

by Deborah A. Fritz

2nd Edition

Published by the American Library Association

Completely revised and updated

This manual brings together the cataloging rules, various sources of rule interpretations, and the USMARC coding standards for the five types of materials covered.

This is the third update, but the first complete revision of Cataloging with AACR2R and MARC since its initial publication in 1998. Most of the revisions are to incorporate changes from the 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 amendments to AACR, LCRI, and CONSER, and to MARC21 updates from 1999-2003. However, all chapters have also been reviewed, revised, and in some cases, reorganized for clarity.

The goal of ‘CWAM’ (pronounced See-Wham) has always been to give the cataloger facing a MARC record on a computer screen (or a blank template/workform) a place to start. This book is the outcome of the author’s many years of workshops on MARC cataloging, and the inevitable feedback and follow-up research entailed by this activity.

CWAM provides instructions, including step-by-step ‘Cheat sheets’, on searching for records and matching them to items in-hand. CWAM is also organized as a reference manual, so that you can quickly locate:

• whether or not fields are repeatable
• whether the indicators of a field should be coded or left blank
• the common subfields used in each field and whether or not those subfields are repeatable
• the encoding levels of the fields (according to LC and OCLC)
• the relationships between certain fields
• the AACR2R rules for fields (where applicable)
• the AACR2R prescribed source of the information to be provided in the fields
• Notes for each field, where applicable, from LCRI, CONSER, and other ‘expert’ guides
• hints to consider when:

• editing a copied record
• creating a new record from a copied record
• creating an original record

The largest section of the manual is Chapter 3, which pulls the AACR2R rules and MARC coding standards together, in tag order for easy reference.

Review (First edition)

TechKnow v. 4, issue 1 (Spring 1998) p. 3, by Maurer, Margaret (the newsletter of the Technical Services Division of the Ohio Library Council)