J. McRee Elrod wrote:
... All these features make the consolidated ISBD a prime candidate for the use of libraries as a guide to creating bibliographic records, both those who find RDA too expensive, and those who find the RDA directions less than clear.
ISBD, however, is not a code of cataloging rules. The introduction says: "The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is intended to serve as a principal standard to promote universal bibliographic control, that is, to make universally and promptly available, in a form that is internationally acceptable, basic bibliographic data for all published resources in all countries. The main goal of the ISBD is, and has been since the beginning, to provide consistency when sharing bibliographic information." The essence of this was formulated in the first draft of ISBD(M) in 1974 when "bibliographic control" consisted largely of the production of printed national bibliographies. The 1974 draft says, specifically, that "To achieve these aims it was necessary to find a way by which the different elements making up a description could be recognized, by the eye or by a machine, without the need to understand their content. The means adopted is a prescribed system of punctuation." And this statement is more or less repeated in the second paragraph of the 2010 edition. The printed records were thus conceived, at that time, as a communication format for the transmission of structured information. No verbal or numeric tagging could be employed in printed bibliographies, as goes without saying, but the punctuation had to do double duty for that purpose. Now the question must be asked: Is this a view that is still helpful today? When the exchange of bibliographic data takes place between many more partners than in 1974, and no longer in printed form but machine-readable, and increasingly without intellectual intervention but via automated protocols. ISBD might have become obsolete as soon as MARC gained the status of a communication standard. But instead, MARC became, from the beginning, inextricably intertwined with ISBD, even carrying the punctuation, redundantly, at field and subfield boundaries; to this very day. While RDA has meanwhile adopted the view that displays and offline representations of records are not the business of the rules, and ISBD is one among infinitely many conceivable display standards, MARC and ISBD remain largely unchanged. That's not bad, and I think it is a good idea to go on using it as a display standard even in OPACs, but we have to ask the question what the purpose of an ISBD can be in the contexts of our time and age. What we need is, I think, an ISBRF (International Standard Bibliographic Record Format) that can serve for communication (no longer on paper) between systems of all sizes and flavors and understood by all of them without human intervention - thereby carrying the original ISBD concept finally over into the present. ISBD 2010, as it is, cannot do that. IFLA, in other words, has still to realize they should update their view of how UBC might be achieved, and what it might mean today anyhow. B.Eversberg
