Cataloguing Cartographic Materials in Archives

Abstract

SUMMARY After a brief review of the history of the development of cataloguing rules for cartographic materials, both within the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules community and internationally, the author discusses the differences of the cataloguing of this material in archives compared with that in libraries. He states that the cataloguing of this material in archives relates to how the material was created or produced in the context of how it was used. Archival cataloguing (or archival description as archivists prefer to call the process) emphasizes methodology over the material itself. The paper attempts to give a short overview of the methodologies, their development and application. It uses diagrams and an example to illustrate the archival methodology and concludes that cataloguing records and archival description records produced by these methods may co-exist on the same database but that current computer systems developed for library applications have, in general, not developed the capability to display open hierarchically structured linked multilevel descriptions such as required by the archival methodology of multilevel description.