Guidelines for the application of the ISBDs to the description of component parts

Abstract

The publication of the Guidelines for the Application of the ISBDs to the Description of Component Partsmarks the completion of a long and complex effort to establish an internationally accepted framework for the description of items such as journal articles, chapters and other parts of monographs, individual tracks on sound recordings, and other types of “works within works”. From the outset it was recognized that achieving acceptance of such a framework would be difficult, particularly inasmuch as the potential implementors are divided between two communities that over time have established rather different practices and traditions with respect to bibliographic description: the library community, on the one hand, with its cataloguing tradition; and, on the other, the abstracting and indexing community with its citation practices. Although the initiative was taken by the library community, through IFLA, and was conceived within the overall programme for the development of International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), it was acknowledged that the requirements and constraints of the abstracting and indexing community would have to be addressed in parallel with those of the library community in order to ensure that the resulting framework would meet the objective of providing the necessary bridge between the descriptions formulated in the two communities.