"Bibliographic Standards Committee, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association."

Graphic Materials: Rules for Describing Original Items and Historical Collections was compiled by Elisabeth Betz Parker in 1982 to provide guidelines for cataloging a wide variety of visual materials from photographic prints, negatives, and albums to posters, cartoons, popular and fine prints, and architectural drawings. These rules are a national standard supplement to Chapter 8 of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, which focuses on modern, published audiovisual materials. For groups of pictures as well as individual items, the guidelines cover transcribing and devising titles; stating creators, producers, and dates; expressing quantities, media, and dimensions; and writing subject, user advisory, and other kinds of notes. There are also sample catalog records, a glossary, and an index.

This comprehensive and no-nonsense guide to working with special collections and rare books is an essential day-to-day companion. Working with special collections can vary dramatically from preserving a single rare book to managing and digitizing vast mixed-media archives, yet the role of the information professional is always critical in tapping into the potential of these collections, protecting their legacy and bringing them to the attention of the wider public. This book offers up-to-date guidance which pulls together insights from best practice across the heritage sector to build innovative, co-operative and questioning mind-sets that will help them to cope in turbulent times. The Handbook covers all aspects of special collections work: preservation, developing collections, understanding objects, emergency planning, security, legal and ethical concerns, cataloguing, digitization, marketing, outreach, teaching, impact, advocacy and fundraising. New to this edition: coverage of new standards and concepts including unique and distinctive collections (UDCs), The Leeds Typology, Archive Accreditation, PD 5454:2012 and PAS 197 discussion of the major changes to laws affecting special collections including UK copyright law relating to library/archive exception and orphan works and forthcoming changes to data protection in the EU exploration of new trends in research including the rise of digital humanities, open access, the impact agenda and the REF updates to the sections on marketing, audience development and fundraising to include social media, customer journey mapping and crowdsourcing and more consideration of impact and indicators, digitization and new skills frameworks from CILIP and RBMS. This is the essential practical guide for anyone working with special collections or rare books in libraries, archives, museums, galleries and other heritage organizations. It is also a useful introduction to special collections work for academics and students taking library and information courses.

Music Description and Access: Solving the Puzzle of Cataloging is both a textbook for students and a handbook and reference source for practicing catalogers. The bulk of the book is a step-by-step guide to cataloging music materials, with dozens of examples showing images of published scores or audio recordings. Content and encoding are treated separately, using RDA and MARC21. Interspersed in the chapters on practical cataloging are short Historical Asides, essays putting particular devices or conventions into context. These essays supplement a chapter on cataloging history, which follows an introductory chapter that sets the stage for the task at hand. The book ends with a chapter by Maristella Feustle on describing and providing access to music special collections, using both archival and rare-music-cataloging standards. Aids in navigating the book include an index plus multiple lists and tables. A bibliography and a list of cataloging tools that are available online are also given.

In a visual and artifact-filled world, cataloging one-of-a-kind cultural objects without published guidelines and standards has been a challenge. Now for the first time, under the leadership of the Visual Resources Association, a cross-section of five visual and cultural heritage experts, along with scores of reviewers from varied institutions, have created a new data content standard focused on cultural materials. This cutting-edge reference offers practical resources for cataloging and flexibility to meet the needs of a wide range of institutions—from libraries to museums to archives. Consistently following these guidelines for selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate metadata elements in cultural materials' catalog records: Promotes good descriptive cataloging and reduces redundancy Builds a foundation of shared documentation Creates data sharing opportunities Enhances end-user access across institutional boundaries Complements existing standards (AACR) This is a must-have reference for museum professionals, visual resources curators, archivists, librarians and anyone who documents cultural objects (including architecture, paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, visual media, performance art, archaeological sites, and artifacts) and their images.