The Construction and Prospect of China National Bibliography

The national bibliography is a comprehensive and systematic catalog that gathers and records the information of all the publications in a country, and serves as the base for monitoring and managing all the information related. China National Bibliography in modern times has been continuously developed and improved, thanks to the legacies from its past and the experiences of other countries. The present paper first reviews the past and the present of China National Bibliography, then discusses the progress of researches on the application of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), and finally explains the survey on the feasibility of adopting the new cataloging standard RDA in China. Although the FRBRization of China National Bibliography, to a certain extent, facilitates the readers’ use, we argue that the FRBRization of the existing MARC data cannot realize all the ideas FRBR creates. There are some problems, such as the distinctions between works and expressions, the construction issues of the bibliographic and authority data. In the process of implementing localized RDA in the cataloging of foreign materials of all languages and types, the National Library of China conducted an investigation into the feasibility of implementing RDA in the cataloging of Chinese literature, finding that although there is not a vast gulf between RDA and current Chinese cataloging standards, a lot of problems do need to be resolved both theoretically and practically. First, the Chinese national standard “Resource Description” of the day and the CNMARC standards need to be improved. Second, it is urgent to reduce the increasing manual workload of the catalogers caused by adopting RDA. Third, both the staff force and the system reserve ability of the member libraries under Online Library Cataloging Center of China should be taken into account. Fourth, RDA would add new data elements, thus the initiation of this new standard simultaneously requires updating and transforming the integrated library system. Last but not the least, the application of RDA also requires the development of corresponding online toolkits to improve the cataloging efficiency.

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