Bibliographic record

Bibliographic records are usually retrievable from bibliographic indexes (e.g., contemporary bibliographic databases) by author, title, index term, or keyword. Bibliographic records can also be referred to as surrogate records or metadata. Bibliographic records can represent a wide variety of published contents, including traditional paper, digitized, or born-digital publications. The process of creation, exchange, and preservation of bibliographic records are parts of a larger process, called bibliographic control.

History

The earliest known bibliographic records come from the catalogues (written in cuneiform script on clay tablets) of religious texts from 2000 B.C., that were identified by what appear to be key words in Sumerian. In ancient Greece, Callimachus of Cyrene recorded bibliographic records on 120 scrolls using a system called pinakes.

Early American library catalogs in the colonial period were typically made available in book form, either manuscript or printed. In modern America, the title and author of a work were enough to distinguish it among others and order its record within a collection. However, as more and different kinds of resources arose, it became necessary to collect more information to distinguish them from one another. This conceptual framework of the bibliographic record as a collection of data elements served American librarianship well in its first one-hundred years. Challenges to the current method have arisen in the form of new and different distribution methods, especially of the digital variety, and raise questions about whether the traditional conceptual model is still relevant and applicable.