Resource description and standards
Adoption of internationally approved standards and principles is crucial for NBAs responsible for disseminating bibliographic records for national and international exchange. Such bibliographic standards include:
- Cataloguing rules
- Metadata formats
- Authority control
- Classification schemes
- Identifiers
- Script conversion
- Character sets.
National libraries have long advocated standardisation of exchange formats, cataloguing rules and communication protocols as an extension of the IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) programme.