This brief work is divided into two sections: principles (16 pages) and recommendations (23 pages), the latter largely composed of examples of online public access catalogue (OPAC) displays.

The focus of the guidelines (not standards) is on the display of bibliographic and authority records for the public in general libraries. There is some discussion of searching, but creating standards for searching is not a purpose of the report, nor does it address displays for library functions, e.g., acquisitions or serial check-in.

Although bibliographic records and current integrated library systems (ILS) are not yet equipped to handle Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) recommendations concerning showing relationships among manifestations of works, samples are included of what such displays might be.

There is an extensive international bibliography (5 pages), which had insufficient editing. For example, two research projects produced at the University of Toronto as a requirement for the Master of Information Science degree are listed, but neither is identified as such. One has the University as publisher (Chan), the other gives no publisher (Luk). The bibliography lists me under my middle name (McRee) rather than my surname (Elrod). Professor L. C. Howarth was faculty reader for both of the research projects mentioned above and is also the chair of the task force that produced this report. These two research projects, like this final report, fail to consider an International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) display.

With the move from card catalogs to online catalogs, library system developers and vendors have largely taken over from catalogers the role of catalog building, reducing catalogers to individual record creation. The ISBD has been largely abandoned as a standard for display.

This publication might have represented an effort by catalogers to resume their traditional role as catalog builders, and to restore the ISBD as a standard, a standard that rests on over a century of cataloger experience in catalog creation. But not one of the examples in this work is of an ISBD display, which is strange for an International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) publication, since IFLA created the ISBD.

For the most part, in our OPACs, labeled displays have replaced paragraphed ISBD displays, taking up valuable display space, and mislabeling elements, such as criminal defendants, composers, illustrators, translators, editors, and so on, as “Authors.” This report does not question that development.

All examples in this work assume labels, and most use “Author,” although there are examples in languages other than English, and one example uses “Personal Name” (6). The closest to an ISBD display is one labeled “Brief Description” (13), although elsewhere “Description” is used to label collation.

The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2), their proposed replacement Resource Description and Access (RDA), and MARC21 could all mandate ISBD display. Instead, the RDA creators seem to have decided to relegate ISBD to an appendix as an option for description and display. That does not bode well for availability of ISBD-compliant software from vendors, who seem to find it preferable to make fun of ISBD punctuation and design over more elaborate labels to help the catalogue user. As Bernhard Eversberg has repeatedly stated in Autocat postings, labels work less well where not everybody speaks English, unless the patron has several sets of labels from which to choose. But even then, some data elements refuse to be neatly labeled. If MARC were to say “records are to be displayed in ISBD order and with ISBD punctuation,” that’s what everybody would do. There is a good example of a MARC display (fig. 14 d).