This volume is the third in a series documenting the proceedings of the regional IFLA Meetings of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code (IME ICC). The previous meetings were held in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2003, for the European and North American experts, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004, for the Latin American region. The reports of those meetings were reviewed in LRTS volume 49, number 3, and volume 50, number 4, respectively.

The Cairo meeting was attended by cataloging experts from the Arabic-speaking world, and many of the papers are presented in both English and Arabic. The presentation papers have been carried over from the previous volumes, but in somewhat updated versions. Even though they are more background than directly part of the international cataloging principles, John Byrum’s paper on the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), delivered by Mauro Guerrini, Patrick Le Boeuf’s paper on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), delivered by Elena Escolano Rodríguez, and Barbara Tillett’s paper on the virtual international authority file should be useful to anyone looking for a succinct summary of the principles of these concepts that underlie the structure of our present and future catalogs.

The statement of principles is a work in progress, and several drafts of the principles are presented in the book. It is sometimes hard to understand the relationships between the drafts, but the latest one is a post-meeting draft from April 2006, after voting and discussion among the Middle Eastern participants and subsequent voting by participants in the previous two meetings. This draft rectifies some of the problems seen in the report of IME ICC2, but it still has a discussion of corporate body access points that sounds a very similar to the main entry rules in 9.1 of the Paris Principles, even though the new principles otherwise avoid the question of main entry. Both in section 1, “Scope,” and in the appendix on objectives for the construction of cataloging codes, catalog user convenience is claimed as the highest principle, which is a laudable goal, but there is little guidance on what this means and no apparent recognition of the fact that there are many kinds of users.

As in the previous meetings, there were working groups set up for personal names, corporate names, seriality, uniform titles, and the general material designation as well as for multivolume or multipart structures. Summaries of their discussions and recommendations are presented. There was not a lot new to be added in this third round of work on the principles, but it was striking how many difficult issues are presented by different languages and scripts, even in countries that have long been working with AACR2 and the ISBDs. A glossary is being developed to go along with the statement, and at least one working group noted the need for a definition for “persona,” which seems especially necessary given the confusion that seems to have revolved around this term for the different bibliographical identities recognized by some cataloging rules, including AACR2.

As with the predecessor volumes, the value of this book lies in its documentation of the process of developing a statement of principles to replace the 1961 Paris Principles and making recommendations for a possible future international cataloging code. A fourth meeting was held for Asian experts in Seoul, South Korea, in 2006, and the fifth and last meeting for sub-Saharan African experts in Durban, South Africa, in 2007. A final draft of the statement is expected to be sent out for worldwide review in 2008.