The Anglo‐American Cataloging Rules, 1967

FOR CATALOGUERS, and librarians generally, 1967 will prove to be a vintage year, the annus mirabilis for the cataloguer, with the publication in January of the American text of the new Anglo‐American Code. The British text is expected to be published in November. The availability in this country of the American text gives some little time for a preview of the British version. The profession has had ample warning; the new code has had a long gestation period. For the Americans, especially, it is the culmination of many years of effort, from their preliminary second edition of the 1908 code in 1941, through the second edition of 1949, the Library of Congress Rules for Descriptive Cataloging of the same year, the Lubetzky Report of 1953, the Draft Code of 1960, to the Paris Principles of 1961. The present code owes very much to its predecessors, particularly the Paris Principles, which were in effect a set of guidelines agreed on internationally to ensure broad international consistency between any future national codes without spelling out the detailed rules. Except for one or two instances the new code follows the Paris Principles closely.