Although not as widely recognized as it should be, ISBD is a unitary standard to address content, communication, and display. The latter two aspects are intertwined in how ISBD covers both the Areas and the punctuation to formulate the data in a unit card.
Whether online catalogs retain the unit card format in their displays or whether we are cognizant of the lingering effect of the unit card in our work, the fact remains that AACR2 is predicated on building an ISBD record and the ISBD record is predicated on building a unit card. To borrow from biology, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- the embryonic development of an organism recreates historical evolutionary developments. For all their digital trappings and online presentation, our current records retain that gestational feature of the unit card. RDA is significant in its attempt to break that premise, to "jump" our data to a new framework and thereby open the possibility to similarly free the mechanisms of communicating our data. John F. Myers, Catalog Librarian Schaffer Library, Union College 807 Union St. Schenectady NY 12308 518-388-6623 [email protected] -----Original Message----- Jim Weinheimer wrote: ISBD/AACR2 guide the cataloger to put together a description for ISBD *display*?! I confess that this is a very strange idea to me. I personally don't think about display when I am cataloging anything. Very few online catalogs use an ISBD display for the unit record, so Worldcat, Voyager, Dynix, etc. each have all kinds of displays for their records.
