Rare Books and Special Collections Group

At its meeting on 15 June 2004, the Rare Books Group (RBG) Committee agreed that in principle it supported the establishment of a Bibliographic Standards Committee (BSC) as a sub-committee of the RBG Committee, with a remit covering all matters relevant to describing and providing access to collections of rare books and, where appropriate, manuscripts.  Expressions of interest were accordingly sought (through this Newsletter, the Group's website and lis-rarebooks) and a detailed proposal developed. On 22 February 2005 the RBG Committee approved the setting up of the committee, to be known as the UK Bibliographic Standards Committee of the CILIP Rare Books Group; with the name change of the Group, the Committee name later became the UK Bibliographic Standards Committee of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group. Membership is as follows:

• Dr Brian Hillyard, Rare Book Collections Manager, National Library of Scotland (Chair)
• Dr Karen Attar, Rare Books Librarian, Senate House Library, University of London (Secretary)
• Alan Danskin, British Library and member of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Committee
• William Hale, Assistant Under-Librarian (Rare Books), Cambridge University Library
• Elizabeth Henderson, Rare Books Librarian, University of St Andrews
• Shelley de Kock, formerly Senior Information Assistant (Special Collections), King's College London
• Simon May, British and Early Printed Collections, British Library
• Claire Powell, Chief Cataloguer, London Library
• Sarah Wheale, OULS Early Printed Books Project, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

The BSC held its inaugural meeting on 20 April 2005. It agreed upon specific tasks:

1. to act as a review panel for proposals for ISBD(A) revision;
2. to act as a review panel for proposals for DCRM(B) revision;
3. to provide input into matters concerning rare books for RDA;
4. to revise the RBG Guidelines for Cataloguing Rare Books prior to making them available on the RBG website;
5. to provide pages on the RBG website, informing librarians of what we are doing and providing useful information and links;
6. to co-ordinate British submissions for new thesauri terms, to be discussed by email and proposed to the US editor. It should particularly note discrepancies between British and American usage;
7. to inform the Book Industry Communications (BIC), Bibliographic Standards Group of desired changes relevant for rare books in MARC format;
8. to provide advice and training, e.g. via seminars and BSC pages on the RBG website.

Subsequently, the BSC established liaisons over the ISBD(A) revision (International Standards of Book Description (Antiquarian)), DCRM(B) (Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books)) and RDA: pressing tasks, as revision of all three sets of cataloguing codes [1] was underway. (That of ISBD(A) and RDA still is; DCRM(B) is due to appear in 2007.) For RDA, input is requested on specific issues; for the codes devoted to rare books, BSC input ranges over the entire codes.  For all three codes, the BSC invited comments from the UK cataloguing community via the discussion lists lis-rarebooks and lis-ukbibs and co-ordinated British responses. The British comments ranged from suggestions of slightly changed phraseology in the interests of increased clarity to the updating of examples to the substance of rules.  For example, for DCRM(B) we argued against a suggested departure from DCRB which would have all engraved title pages described as leaves of plates. For ISBD(A), among other things the BSC argued against an option to ignore prescribed (ISBD) punctuation in the imprint field and present the information exactly as it appears on the title page.

In addition to considering rules, we discuss the appropriate recording of other pieces of information in a catalogue record. A researcher's remark about the value of including in a catalogue record the price stated on the title page of early printed books, as the price might say something about the edition and will indicate the intended readership, led to a debate about whether the MARC field for current prices would be an appropriate place to record the information, and whether it needed to be indexed. (The solution was to record the information in a general note.)

The mounting of the RBG Guidelines for Cataloguing Rare Books on the Group's website is envisaged. At the request of the RBSCG Committee, the Chairman has undertaken an exploratory review of standards for cataloguing non-archival manuscripts online. A consultative meeting, attended by twelve librarians from eight libraries and the Chairman and Secretary of the BSC, was held at Senate House Library on 3 May 2006 to explore current standards, and the possible desirability of developing further ones. Liaison is underway with AMARC and the Society of Archivists, and a report will be made available.

In 2006 the BSC collaborated with the Historic Libraries Forum to provide two training sessions in London on rare book cataloguing and bibliographical format, in line with the training offered in Scotland by the group Rare Books in Scotland.

A member of the BSC addressed the Cataloguing & Indexing Group's annual conference on 13 September 2006 on 'When the rules change: cataloguing rare books'.

The UK Bibliographic Standards Committee of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group is intended to serve British librarians and librarianship. It is about rare books; and it is about cataloguing. Please do make use of the Group: let us know if you need cataloguing training, and make the BSC a forum for your rare book cataloguing views and concerns.

[1] While ISBD(A) is a standard which underpins national cataloguing rules rather than a cataloguing code, it is convenient to refer to it in the same way, as its instructions are similar (indeed, the preface to the draft to the 2006 revision states that it has been influenced by DCRB, Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books (1991)).  Moreover, some libraries use it as a cataloguing code: see Ann Lennon and David Pearson, Rare Book Cataloguing in the British Isles: Results of a Survey Carried out on Behalf of the Rare Books Group of the Library Association, British Library Research Paper, 94 (London: British Library Research and Development Department, 1991), p. 20.