Universal Bibliographic Control

Abstract

The historical development of cataloguing notes the efforts of the world library experts and institutions to make uniform the catalog (and bibliographic) description on international level. In the last three decades of last century the important part of the IFLA's work was dedicated to development of programme of the Universal Bibliographic Control on national level and for the international exchange of data. Therefore, the Universal bibliographic control engages in the basic questions of librarianship – how to make accessible the records published throughout the world to all who need those records for any reason and from any place. The best choice of bibliographic records are the current national bibliographies. The automatic database is based on UNIMARC - Universal Format for Machine Readable Cataloguing. The UNIMARC is defined in that way it formally follows the international principles and standards, i. e. it makes possible the communication between different national solutions.