John Hostage said:
I think most people would agree that AACR2 was based on the ISBD. The essential characteristics were the 8 areas of description, a prescribed order of elements, and prescribed punctuation. Although some claim that ISBD is one of the foundations of RDA, I see RDA as a fairly clean break with that tradition. Punctuation and order of elements are relegated to an appendix.
I appreciate that there is now an effort to harmonize RDA and ISBD. Although RDA claims to be still compatible to the ISBD, there are some rather striking deviations. One example is content type/media type, which is quite close but not identical to ISBD group 0. Another example is the restriction of square brackets to information supplied from sources outside the resource.
Mind, it's not that I'm against these RDA rules, on principle, but I think things like this should have been discussed and agreed on within the international ISBD community first. The ISBD has been a common core of many cataloguing codes for decades. This common ground shouldn't be casually abandoned.
The UNIMARC format (http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/unimarc-formats-and-related-documentation) attempts to keep in alignment with the ISBD. The concise format is available for free download of the PDF file, but the full format is only available for sale. This is now a burning issue within IFLA for this and other standards. From the concise format you can see that it's similar to MARC 21 in its use of fields, subfields, and indicators, but the fields represent different things.
I'd argue that the ISBD has been the inspiration and foundation of every library data format which has ever been designed (for the descriptive part of a title record). Wasn't one of the basic aims of the ISBD to "assist in the conversion of bibliographic records to machine readable form"? Whether ISBD punctuation is used or not, the structuring of the record always closely follows the ISBD.
Germany is planning to switch to RDA (a translation is in progress), but up to now they have used RAK (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeln_f%C3%BCr_die_alphabetische_Katalogisierung) (sorry, no English page) for description and access points. The descriptive part was also based on ISBD.
For the main cataloguing code RAK, the ISBD(M) was used as the basis for the bibliographic description. There are also supplementary rules, e.g. for non-book materials (unlike with AACR2, in Germany we don't have everything together in one single folder), which have made use of later ISBDs like ISBD(NBM). For some reason unknown to me, there are some minor aberrations from ISBD punctuation, though.
The new group 0 of the ISBD has not been integrated, as the further development of RAK was abandoned about ten years ago (following a decision to migrate to Anglo-American standards).
Of course, there are also rules about the choice of access points and rules for headings in RAK (often different from AACR2), which naturally are not based on the ISBD.
The French have, I believe, minutely adopted the ISBD for the bibliographic description.
In 2003, there was a comparison of a number of cataloguing codes, which also addressed the question of the ISBD:
http://tinyurl.com/8rsga3d Heidrun -- --------------------- Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A. Stuttgart Media University Faculty of Information and Communication Wolframstrasse 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
