Abstract
The formal commitment of the British Library to AACR2 and Dewey 19 entailed substantial changes to the U.K. MARC format, the BLAISE Filing Rules, and a variety of products produced for the British Library itself and for other libraries, including the British National Bibliography. The British Library file conversion involved not only headings but also algorithmic conversion of the descriptive cataloguing.
Highlights
Along with the U.S Library of Congress and the national libraries of Australia and Canada, the British Library was formally committed to the adoption of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2) and Decimal Classification, 19th Edition (DC19) in 1981
There is, never an ideal time for making major changespolitically, economically, or technically; and the Bibliographic Services Division (BSD) found itself having a large number of preexisting separate systems, for our batch processing work, which had grown up over a long period of time and had in most cases been tailor-made to the individual products
BSD is responsible for a multiplicity of products and services, almost all of which were to be affected to some extent by the change toAACR2/DC19
Summary
The major printed publication of the division is the British National Bibliography. It is arguable that for the printed publications (especially the weeklies) there would have been little justification for retrospective conversion. The files could have been cut off at the end of 1980 and started afresh for 1981-it might, have precluded, or certainly have made more messy, the possibility of any multiannual cumulations across this period
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