Content guidelines for the creation of new forms

One of the most important aspects of the authority work is the definition of rules for creating and using authority records. The more international these rules are the easier it will be to exchange authorized headings and to find human resources familiar with these standards.

The following list gives an overview of the issues of the FAODOC cataloguing rules regarding the management of authorized forms:

There is no clear distinction between rules for creating an authorized heading and rules for describing a document.
The rules for the creation of authorized forms are in many ways incompatible with international standards like AACR2.
The authorized FAO corporate body headings currently used by FAODOC do not correspond to the official FAO form of names maintained by FAOTerm.
Incomplete rules to establish which form of name is the authorized form.
No rules for variant form of names.
No relationships between authorized headings.

Based on the mentioned problems, and keeping in mind the content model defined for corporate bodies, conferences, projects, journals and series, we propose to use FAOTERM as the official source for authorized headings for FAO corporate bodies and to modify the current rules for establishing authorized forms based on AACR2.

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2)

We propose to use the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) and simplify the creation of the authorized forms for the following reasons:

the AACR2 are the most used rules in the library community on an international level;
most of non FAO headings have already been created in other catalogues and can be thus easily imported.

The most important issues faced while defining new rules based on AACR2 are listed below:

Choice of authorized heading rules

The current rules used by FAODOC indicate entering the well-known international bodies under their acronym and only the acronyms listed in the Acronyms of International Bodies . FAOTERM gives both the official full form of a corporate body and its abbreviation. FAOTERM does not however indicate which of the two, the full name or the shortened name, is the authorized form. According to AACR2 the full form is the authorized form, if there is as full form and a shortened from present. In addition, the content models described in the precedent sections allow to separate the full form and the acronym in two different fields, considering as preferred-term the full form.

Construction of multilingual authorized forms using AACR2

There is an issue with the AACR2 rules regarding the decision of which language should be used for the authorized form, especially for corporate bodies:

“If the corporate body appears in different languages, use the official form for that corporate body. If there is more than an official form, choose the English one.”

With the new content model, each concept can have as many labels as required, but only one as preferred for each language.

AACR2 demands you to enter the Parent Body in front of any subordinated body

According to AACR2 the subordinate body should be preceded by the parent body. In the content model this is resolved through the use of the concept-to-concept relationships isPartOf –hasPart.

Description Rules