From Anderson to ORDAC: A History of Bibliographic Policy Discussion in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article presents a history of national bibliographic policy discussion in Australia, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, assessing the contribution this discussion has made to the development of international bibliographic standards. In earlier times, various factors worked against progress towards standardisation and policy innovation, including the extant Anglo-American codes and inherited bibliographic conventions, the difficulties of establishing a national cataloguing agency, and the tyranny of distance experienced by national cataloguing committees. In the mid-twentieth century, Australian cataloguers became more involved in international bibliographic developments, but it was the advent of Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) cataloguing in Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s, that gave them a much stronger voice both within and outside the country, as records became much more sharable. Tensions between institutional and individual cataloguing views were eased through the establishment of the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, which represented both, while a broader level of engagement was successfully fostered by the Cataloguers Sections of the Library Association of Australia. This engagement has weakened in recent times, but this is symptomatic of a more general trend towards the globalisation of cataloguing and metadata, whereby national policy discussions are less relevant than are discussions in particular domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliographic policy
• cataloguing
• classification
• standards
• history
• Australia

Introduction

Following the recent formation of the Oceania RDA Committee (ORDAC) to represent the views of the region’s librarians on the development of the cataloguing standard, Resource Description and Access (www.rda-rsc.org), it is perhaps timely to reflect on the contributions made by Australian librarianship, specifically, to the development of international bibliographic policy and standards over the past century or so. This article provides a summary of how discussions around cataloguing and classification developed at a national level over the course of the last century, and how these discussions eventually moved, in a significant way, into the international arena. It identifies the key reasons why this discourse progressed in the way it did, and assesses its legacy, as library resource description increasingly transcends national boundaries. The focus will be on policy discussions, rather than on discussions around infrastructure, although it is contended that the former were critically influenced by the latter.

Early Discussions and Contributions

For discussions of cataloguing and classification policy to be ‘national’, they need a national forum. In Australia, one of the main forums for such discussions over the past century has been the country’s professional association for librarians. While the current association (ALIA) traces its roots back to 1937 with the founding of the Australian Institute of Librarians (AIL), an ‘Australasian’ association was formed more than a generation prior, in 1896. The Library Association of Australasia convened three general meetings in 1896, 1900 and 1902, as well as a ‘Sydney meeting’ in 1898 (Talbot, 1998).

One of the driving forces behind this Association was H.C.L. Anderson, Principal Librarian of the Free Public Library of Sydney from 1893 to 1906. Considered the leading figure in this early period of Australian librarianship (Metcalfe, 1967), Anderson’s bibliographic initiatives include the creation of a set of cataloguing rules that were regarded favourably by prominent librarians overseas, and the construction an extensive alphabetical index to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme, which he also introduced to the Sydney (and later State) Library (Anderson, 1902; Nelson, 1987). Both the cataloguing rules and the DDC scheme were discussed at the Association’s first conference (Library Association of Australasia [LAA], 1896), but this discussion did not lead to any kind of concerted effort on the part of Australasian librarians to standardise their cataloguing and classification practice. The Association did not meet again after 1902 (Talbot, 1998).

In other parts of the world, on the other hand, the standardisation of cataloguing had been a major topic of discussion among librarians for the previous two or three decades, with a series of cataloguing codes having been published to this end. Charles Cutter’s ground-breaking Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalog (1876) had eventually led to the 1908 Anglo-American code, Cataloguing rules: Author and title entries, published by the American and British Library Associations (American Library Association & (British) Library Association, 1908a, 1908b). The reason for this strong interest in standardisation had, from the outset, been predominantly economic: standardised cataloguing greatly facilitated the sharing of catalogue records, as did the advent of the card catalogue during this period. In the United States in particular, where by this time there were a considerable number of libraries with large and growing collections, and a significant amount of overlap between these collections, ‘cooperative cataloguing’ was an increasingly attractive proposition. The Library of Congress (LC) had started its cataloguing distribution service in 1901, and so its adoption of the 1908 code greatly influenced the decision of other American libraries to do the same, just as LC’s adoption of later codes, and other bibliographic standards, was to do (Yee, 2009).

Although the 1908 code was eventually adopted by many of the antipodean libraries, the incentive to standardise was far less pronounced in Australia, with fewer and smaller collections and less overlap with LC; likewise, there was no library with the resources to act as a national cataloguing agency. Even three decades after LC had started distributing its cards, very few of them had reached this continent according to a survey of Australian library cataloguing, mentioned again below.

The success of LC’s service and other pioneering examples of shared cataloguing did not go unnoticed by Australian librarians, however. In 1928, for instance, at the conference that instituted the Australian Library Association, the somewhat tentative, and short-lived, successor to the Australasian association, Pitt (1928) strongly endorsed a ‘central cataloguing’ system that had been set up by public libraries in England, and recommended the introduction of similar systems in Australia; indeed, he proposed that the National Library be resourced to serve as the country’s ‘central cataloguing’ source. Similarly, John Metcalfe (1995) noted the value to American libraries of the LC service, based on the ‘unit card’, in the report of his tour of UK and US libraries in 1934–5. It was at this time that Australian libraries began to have a greater need for record supply, as their growth accelerated in both size and number, spurred on by the highly influential (and critical) Munn-Pitt report (1935).

The AIL Committees

Thus, when the AIL was founded at its inaugural meeting in 1937, superseding the Australian Library Association, ‘central cataloguing’ and the related concept of a union catalogue were already ideas ripe for exploration. In fact, it was with these topics in mind that the General Council established a Committee on Cataloguing and Classification the following year, requesting that it ascertained the cataloguing practices amongst Australian libraries, with a view to standardising these practices, as a first step toward more efficient cataloguing arrangements (General Council (AIL), 1938).

Initially convened by Leigh Scott from the University of Melbourne, the Committee decided, in the end, that conducting a survey at that time was beyond its means. Instead, it simply recommended that the ALA-LA code of 1908 and the DDC scheme be consistently followed (Committee on Cataloguing and Classification (AIL), 1939–47). Although the Committee continued through the war years, in truth it rarely, if ever, met. It was given little direction by the General Council and had correspondingly little to report back (Committee on Cataloguing and Classification (AIL), 1939–47). The tyranny of distance for Australian librarians of this era was such that simply acquiring copies of the new rules being worked on in North America and Britain was considered something of an achievement, even after the war. Reliance on the postal system severely limited discussion among committee members based in different parts of Australia, let alone among librarians on different sides of the world.

In 1945, the Committee responded to the suggestion from the General Council that the creation of an Australian cataloguing code would address a perceived lack of standardised practice by pointing out that publishing practices in Australia did not diverge especially from those of North America and Britain. Instead, it recommended that Australian libraries adopt the ‘new’ 1941 code issued by the American Library Association (ALA) once it had been ‘finalised’ (American Library Association [ALA], 1941; Committee on Classification and Cataloguing (AIL), 1939–47). The Committee’s convenor that year was Jean Arnot from the Public Library of New South Wales, who would later be more enthusiastic about an Australian code.

While the Committee on Cataloguing and Classification kept a watching brief on Anglo-American code developments, another committee was endeavouring (albeit slowly) to make a more active contribution to bibliographic standards. In 1938, the AIL had also established a Committee on the Classification of Australiana (General Council (AIL), 1938), which eventually issued a new set of period subdivisions it proposed for the Australian history section of DDC (994) (Committee on Classification of Australiana (AIL), 1940). Unfortunately, these reached the editors too late for the fourteenth edition of the scheme, published in 1942, but, as it turned out, the new edition included an expanded section broadly in line with the proposal (Dewey, 1942). Later, in 1945, the Committee was re-established to work on the DDC period subdivisions for Australian literature (Committee on Classification of Australiana (AIL), 1947–48). While the DDC editors cited their principle of ‘daughter’ literatures, including Australian English literature, following the pattern set by their ‘mother’ literatures (in this case British English literature), an option to prefix DDC numbers with a letter so that a sequence for a particular national literature could be created was supported by the Committee and was included in the next edition (Committee on Classification of Australiana (AIL), 1947–8; Dewey, 1951).

As it turned out, the ALA code of 1941 ended up being superseded by the more streamlined codes of 1949, published by LC and ALA, covering headings and description, respectively (American Library Association [ALA], 1949; Library of Congress [LC], 1949). Meanwhile, Australian librarians continued to press for a ‘central cataloguing’ solution, with the AIL replacing its Committee on Cataloguing and Classification with a Committee on Central Cataloguing, convened by Ernest Clark, then of the University of Tasmania. The new committee’s task was, specifically, to examine the feasibility and level of interest amongst Australian libraries in a central source for cataloguing copy. It did this by conducting a survey, probably similar to the one envisaged a decade earlier, which asked libraries about the cataloguing rules, subject headings and classification schemes they followed, and about any sources of cataloguing copy they already used (Committee on Central Cataloguing (AIL), 1948, 1949).

The Committee reported that Australian libraries were following a mix of cataloguing codes, and that their catalogues were based on various combinations of entry system (name, title, alphabetical subject and classified), as well as on different card sizes; only the National Library was making use of LC cards, but many libraries indicated an interest in the concept of a national bibliographic agency that would reduce the need for original cataloguing (Committee on Central Cataloguing (AIL), 1948, 1949). The Committee recommended that a national centre be established not only for cataloguing but also for book purchasing. It did not debate the merits of the various codes that were being used, let alone the content of particular rules; its focus was on improving workflows so that resources could be accessed by library patrons with minimal delay.

Although the Committee’s key recommendation of a central bibliographic and book supplier was not taken up (for one thing it required an unrealistic level of cooperation on the part of publishers), its work confirmed, and encouraged, interest in the overarching cause of ‘bibliographic control’. This was in line with discussions and activities that were occurring in other parts of the world, such as in the influential conference on bibliographic control and organisation held at the University of Chicago in 1950 (Shera & Egan, 1951) and in some of the projects being undertaken by UNESCO at that time (Kasiske, 1967).

The LAA Committees

After the AIL was reconstituted as the Library Association of Australia (LAA) in 1949, a new Committee on Cataloguing, Classification and Bibliography was established to cover this growing interest in bibliographic control (Library Association of Australia [LAA], 1950). The Committee represented an amalgamation of the Association’s cataloguing and bibliography committees: as such, cataloguing and classification were seen as part of a suite of activities that also included bibliography and indexing, to be coordinated by libraries as efficiently and effectively as possible to provide optimal access to the post-war information and document explosion.

The new Committee lasted a full decade, until 1960, but the emphasis virtually throughout was far more on the bibliographic apparatus needed to achieve bibliographic control than on cataloguing or classification policy (Committee on Cataloguing, Classification and Bibliography (LAA), 1950–60). Indeed, the Committee, by its own admission, barely discussed ‘cataloguing problems’ (Committee on Cataloguing, Classification and Bibliography (LAA), 1950–52), though it did provide input into a further review of the Australia-related parts of the 900s in DDC (Committee on Cataloguing, Classification and Bibliography (LAA), 1950–60), following up on the work of the AIL Committee on the Classification of Australiana.

The Committee’s focus on infrastructure more than policy reflected the agenda of the wider library community, with more systematic and coordinated bibliographic efforts a priority at both national and international levels. This agenda led to the establishment of the Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographical Services (AACOBS) in 1956, with representation from a broad range of institutions across the country (Bryan, 1979). One of its key goals was to support the development of an ‘Australian Bibliographic Centre’, under the auspices of the National Library of Australia (NLA), which could potentially have become a central cataloguing agency as envisaged by Pitt three decades earlier and which continued to be called for (for example, by Briggs, 1953). However, the large, expanding membership of AACOBS was indicative of the complexity of the relationships amongst the various kinds of library that now existed across the country, at federal, state and local levels.

Accommodating these relationships in ways that could be resourced proved challenging, and although the Australian Bibliographic Centre did materialise, it ended up compiling national union catalogues based on records produced elsewhere (Raymond & Nolan, 1959). This gave it far less authority, and power, to advise on cataloguing issues.

The Paris Conference and Code Revision

However, it was at this time that advice on cataloguing policy started being sought at an international level. In 1956, the LAA Committee on Cataloguing, Classification and Bibliography passed up a direct invitation by the ALA to comment on its code revision, in deference to the yet-to-be-established Australian Bibliographic Centre (Committee on Cataloguing, Classification and Bibliography (LAA), 1950–60). The need for a new national committee was recognised by LAA in 1959, when it established its Cataloguing Code Revision Committee (Library Association of Australia [LAA], 1959). This was not only a response to the growing interest in international bibliographic standardisation, however; it was also another push for a national cataloguing code, as the most effective means of achieving the standardisation needed for cooperative cataloguing at a national level.

This push also perhaps reflected a growing sense on the part of Australian librarians that their libraries were now sufficiently independent to choose their own path, even if this meant one that was strongly influenced by paths being taken in other parts of the world (particularly the Anglo-American world). At any rate, the Committee embraced the concept of a national code more enthusiastically than had the AIL committee in 1945, with Jean Arnot calling for ‘our own Australian code’ at a meeting of cataloguers (LAA Biennial Conference, 1961), held before she left for the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in Paris, which is widely cited as the conference that ushered in the modern era of international bibliographic standardisation amongst libraries.

Two Australian delegates attended the Paris conference: Andrew Osborn, then of the University of Sydney and the LAA Committee’s initial convenor, as well as Arnot, who had taken over from Osborn, and who remained its convenor until she retired in 1969. Having played their role in helping to formulate the ‘principles’ agreed on by the Conference, they came back with the parameters (at least for headings) within which an Australian code could have been developed (Anderson & Chaplin, 1961).

However, with no central cataloguing agency or cooperative cataloguing arrangement in Australia yet on the horizon, there was no particular urgency for this code to be developed. Meanwhile, substantial progress was being made on a new Anglo-American code, and so the Committee decided to wait to see the outcome of this code revision first (Cataloguing Code Revision Committee (LAA), 1962–67).

It could be argued that the Committee’s ‘marking time’, as Arnot put it in her address to LAA members in 1967 (Cataloguing Code Revision Committee (LAA), 1962–67), represented a missed opportunity, but in reality the response to the AIL committee back in 1945 applied more than ever: not all that much that was different about Australian publishing to warrant a separate code, and Australian cataloguing practice was even more tied to Anglo-American practices than it had been two decades earlier. Probably, there never was much of a window for a home-grown Australian code.

On the other hand, this did not mean that Australian libraries had no choice. The drafts of the new Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) were not simply received by the Committee: they were critiqued, in some cases in quite some detail by its members (Cataloguing Code Revision Committee (LAA), 1962–67). When AACR was published in 1967, an informed and considered decision was made by the Australian cataloguing community to adopt the code (even though it was not altogether clear which version of it was favoured) at a meeting of the LAA’s Biennial Conference that year (Cataloguing Code Revision Committee (LAA), 1962–67).

As it happened, it was also in 1967 when a collective cataloguing policy decision amongst Australian libraries first had a direct practical bearing, for it was in this year that the Australian Bibliographic Centre started to distribute the output of the NLA’s Australian National Bibliography (ANB) on cards, emulating the long-established LC service, and also that of the British National Bibliography (Catalogue Card Service for Australian Publications, 1967). There was thus a need for the Centre’s clients to be consulted on the bibliographic standards applied by the ANB, which was met through the establishment of the AACOBS Advisory Panel on Central Cataloguing in 1966, as an outcome of a Seminar on Centralised Cataloguing (Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographic Services, 1956–87). At the Seminar, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and DDC were formally adopted for the ANB, with Australian expansions; in 1967, also at the LAA’s Biennial Conference, the Panel gave AACR its formal endorsement (Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographic Services, 1956–87).

The Committee and the Panel

After AACR was adopted by the Australian library community, the LAA turned the Cataloguing Code Revision Committee into a Committee on Cataloguing, with Janet Hine, also from the NSW Library, taking over from Jean Arnot as convenor (Committee on Cataloguing (LAA), 1968–73). Its remit was correspondingly widened, to cover subject headings and classification, as well as descriptive cataloguing. Moreover, its stance became increasingly proactive. Perhaps most notably, the Committee sought involvement in the AACR revision process (Committee on Cataloguing (LAA), 1968–73). It likewise sought to comment on the new International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD). The Committee thus became less of a ‘standing committee’, waiting for tasks to be assigned it by the General Council, and more of a voice for cataloguers, representing their views on policies and standards, as the application of these policies and standards grew in importance, particularly in light of the advances toward library automation that were beginning to reach Australia.

The AACOBS Panel also continued, although with the ANB now applying a set of relatively stable standards, it saw its work as more limited in scope. The Panel did, however, establish itself as the Australian liaison for DDC revision, and made itself available for comment on other cataloguing matters (Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographic Services, 1956–87). Thus, for the first time, Australian cataloguing had two groups, belonging to separate bodies but with both representing its interests, albeit from different standpoints. While in some ways this could be seen as a positive development, it also risked generating confusion over roles and responsibilities, especially as membership of the LAA committee and the AACOBS panel overlapped.

Both groups could claim a mandate to speak for the Australian library community on cataloguing (and classification) matters. On the one hand, the AACOBS Panel was associated with the NLA and the ANB, and broadly represented the community’s institutional interests. On the other hand, the ANB by no means represented all of Australian cataloguing; even after the NLA started distributing its ANB cards, other libraries (particularly university libraries) continued to carry out significant amounts of original cataloguing. Furthermore, it was the LAA Committee, rather than the Panel, that represented the views of individual cataloguers. An additional complication was that work on the Australian supplement to LCSH (later published as the List of Australian Subject Headings, or LASH) was taken over by a working party independent of both Committee and Panel (McKinlay, 1979).

Members of the Committee and Panel were aware of the ‘polycephalous’ nature of the situation (it was discussed among the Committee’s membership on several occasions (Committee on Cataloguing (LAA), 1968–73)), but while it may have created some inefficiencies, as well as some uncertainty, it did not prevent useful work from being done. The two groups joined forces, in fact, to conduct a new national questionnaire survey of library cataloguing, sent out in 1972 (Committee on Cataloguing (LAA), 1968–73; Hine, 1973).

The Advent of the LAA Cataloguers Section

In any case, the situation was overtaken by another development. While cataloguing arrangements were gradually becoming more efficient, the promise of library automation was also making cataloguing more important. By 1972, Australian cataloguers had become sufficiently populous and active to propose to the LAA that it established a dedicated Cataloguers Section, which it duly did (Executive of the Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1972–79). With 119 foundation members, the Section had grown to 294 members by 1974 (Library Association of Australia [LAA], 1974).

The Cataloguers Section was set up not just to provide a forum for broader discussion of cataloguing issues but also to serve the interests of cataloguers more generally. From the outset, there were plans, for instance, to organise various forms of professional development (Executive of the Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1972–79). Nevertheless, it was felt that the Section was better placed to represent the views of Australian cataloguers on matters of cataloguing policy than was the LAA’s Committee on Cataloguing, which was, therefore, disbanded in 1973 (Committee on Cataloguing (LAA), 1968–73).

A wide range of activities were undertaken by the Section in its early years. State groups started organising local seminars and training, while the Section advocated for cataloguing-related content in the LAA biennial conferences (Executive of the Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1972–79). A special issue of the Australian Library Journal (1974) devoted to cataloguing matters encouraged the Section to launch its own organ, Cataloguing Australia, the following year. In short, the Section soon became the ‘home’ of Australian cataloguing.

The work of the AACOBS Panel also came to an end when it was subsumed by the AACOBS Working Party on Bibliography in 1975 (Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographic Services, 1956–87). The focus of this group, however, was on bibliographic infrastructure, not cataloguing policy, which again left Australia bereft of a specialist committee to represent its views on the latter, leading to the formation of new committees. The AACOBS Panel’s consultative role in DDC revision was taken over by a new DDC Liaison Committee, overseen by the LAA Cataloguers Section (Langker, 1982), while a joint Committee on Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, with members from both AACOBS and the Cataloguers Section, was established to provide feedback to the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) of AACR, as it started drafting a new edition of the Anglo-American code (Library Association of Australia, 1975–77).

The joint Committee not only provided useful input into what became AACR2 (as well as into ISBD editions) but also addressed the ‘polycephaly’ problem, representing the views of both institutions and individual cataloguers. However, the Cataloguers Section was interested in forming a committee with a broader and more permanent scope, and duly established its own Committee on International Cataloguing (CIC) in 1976, to be convened by Eugenie Grieg, from Macquarie University (Executive of the Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1972–79). The CIC’s terms of reference indicate that its role, as envisaged by the Section, was to represent Australian views on international cataloguing standards and their developments, in general, as well as to keep the Section abreast of these developments (Executive of the Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1972–79). The Committee also aimed to advocate for greater Australian input into standards development, and pushed for Australian membership of the JSC, as well as providing comment on the draft AACR2 (Executive of the Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1972–79), the final version of which was published in 1978 (Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR, 1978).

Meanwhile the Cataloguers Section continued to grow its membership, reaching 695 members by 1979 (Library Association of Australia [LAA], 1979), and became even more active at both national and local levels. It had started hosting its own national cataloguing conferences in 1976, with the papers of these conferences providing Cataloguing Australia with more content. Edited by Jack Nelson until 1988, the journal included a mix of news items and longer articles. Initially issued twice a year, by 1979 it had become quarterly. Its articles reflected the breadth of interests of the Section’s members: ‘theory’ and standards development were covered, but so too were more ‘practical’ matters, including those relating to infrastructure, technology, workflow and education.

Through the CIC, its journal and conferences, the Cataloguers Section certainly helped to raise the international profile of Australian cataloguing, as well as its profile domestically, and provided an extensive forum for the discussion of cataloguing matters at a time when there was much to talk about (Langker, 1982). Its activities no doubt assisted in winning the nation a ‘seat at the table’, when Australian representation was added to the JSC in 1981, with Jan Fullerton of the NLA becoming the first Australian representative (www.rda-jsc.org/archivedsite/jscmembers.html).

The Arrival of MARC and ABN

However, it is likely that changing bibliographic realities also played a large part in JSC’s reconfiguration and greater inclusiveness. With the advent of Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) cataloguing, it became much easier to share records, at both national and international levels. The early 1980s saw the establishment of the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN), at the centre of which was a database that became an important platform for national record exchange, as well as record supply. As membership grew, so too did its national union catalogue. The ABN system itself used a modified USMARC format, quite translatable to and from the various other MARC flavours (including AUSMARC) being installed in library systems around Australia and other countries (Conklin, 1988). The ABN, and regional networks such as UNILINK and CAVAL, put Australian libraries on the international cataloguing map, with the potential to contribute as well as import records from across the world (Harvey, 1999b). How Australian libraries, and in particular the NLA, as the country’s leading source of records, applied AACR2, and what they thought of proposed rule changes was clearly now relevant on a practical level to the other JSC members.

The ABN also introduced a greater need for bibliographic standardisation within Australia. From its early days, the ABN included many, if not most, of Australia’s research and academic libraries (Conklin, 1988). For records to be exchanged efficiently, there needed to be agreement on the standards to be employed by all contributing libraries, not just NLA. Discussion around what these standards should be was initiated by the AACOBS Working Party on Bibliography, and became the focus of a dedicated ABN Standards Committee, once it was formed in 1982 (Bastow, 1983).

The ACOC Era

The establishment of the ABN Standards Committee, however, reintroduced the ‘polycephaly problem’, with the interests of individual cataloguers continuing to be represented by LAA’s Cataloguers Section and its CIC, in contrast to the ABN committee’s institutional interests. The solution was an ‘umbrella’ committee: the Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) was established in 1981 as a joint committee of AACOBS, NLA and LAA, and including representation from both the CIC and the ABN Standards Committee. In effect, it was a permanent version of the joint committee that had been formed by AACOBS and the LAA in the mid-1970s, but with a wider, more open-ended remit, not just the revision of AACR (Hoffmann, 1981).

Although the AACR2 revisions were to take up a large amount of ACOC’s time, its agenda, right from the start, covered a wide range of other topics, such as LASH, AUSMARC and DDC (Australian Committee on Cataloguing [ACOC], 1981–86).

The downside of this arrangement was even more structural complexity than had been the case a decade earlier, with the membership of the three committees, as well as their three parent bodies, all overlapping. Indeed, this complexity was a cause for discussion in ACOC’s initial meetings; its second meeting even recommended its own winding up, in favour of the ABN committee (Australian Committee on Cataloguing [ACOC], 1981–86). ACOC carried on, however, due to recognition of its remit to represent the views of Australian cataloguing beyond the ABN. Whereas the ABN Standards Committee and the Cataloguers Section were seen as vehicles for the implementation of bibliographic standards, ACOC came to be seen as the place to discuss how the standards themselves should be developed (Dack, 1987). It thus quickly established itself as an effective sounding board for the JSC representative, as rule revision proposals for AACR2 started coming through in considerable numbers. Through the JSC representative, Australia’s contribution to international cataloguing policy development became systematic and ongoing. Nor was its contribution confined to specifically Australian bibliographic issues; the Australian rep provided feedback on all sorts of proposals tabled at the JSC, just as the other JSC reps did (Australian Committee on Cataloguing [ACOC], 1981–86).

Despite this much fuller level of contribution, concerns remained around the organisational complexity involved in making it. At the Cataloguers Section AGM of 1983, for example, the ‘complex and overlapping relationships’ between the three committees were noted (Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1983). Eventually, in 1985, it was the CIC, rather than ACOC, that was disbanded, as part of a restructuring of the Cataloguers Section, with the LAA reps on ACOC henceforth liaising with their members, and section, directly (Cataloguers Section (LAA), 1986). The DDC Liaison Committee was also disbanded, in favour of an individual LAA member fulfilling this role, similar to that of the JSC representative. The DDC liaison became an ex officio member of ACOC, as the JSC representative had in 1983 (Australian Committee on Cataloguing [ACOC], 1981–86). As the ABN established itself as the main vehicle for cooperative cataloguing within Australia, so its representation on ACOC became all the more important. Conversely, the representation of AACOBS, operating at a higher, strategic level, became less critical. When, therefore, AACOBS became ACLIS (Australian Council of Libraries and Information Services) – when it merged with the Australian Libraries and Information Council in 1988 – ACOC was reconstituted as a joint committee of NLA and LAA only (ACLIS Interim National Council, 1988), and remains constituted as such at the time of writing. Through the JSC rep, it continued to make significant contributions to the AACR revision process through the 1980s and 1990s, and then to the development of AACR2’s successor, Resource Description and Access (RDA), which started in the 2000s. Ann Huthwaite became the first Australian representative to chair JSC in 1999, and Deirdre Kiogaard the second, in 2005. Both served for many years on ACOC, as did a number of other individuals, including Anne Robertson, the ALIA representative on DDC’s Editorial Policy Committee from 2000–2016.

Notwithstanding the continued hard work of individual ACOC members in the twenty-first century, it has to be said that the broader cataloguing landscape, which has formed the backdrop for ACOC’s activities, has not continued to flourish in the same way that it did in the 1970s and 80s. Cataloguing Australia was reduced to two issues a year in 1991, and folded in 1999. The Cataloguers Section itself discontinued when the Association (which had become the Australian Library and Information Association in 1989) was restructured in 2001. The fourteenth and last national cataloguing conference was held in Geelong in 2001 (Australian Library and Information Association, 2001), although ACOC has run a number of seminars since then (www.nla.gov.au/acoc/seminars). ABN’s successor, Libraries Australia (via ‘Kinetica’), continues to provide a platform for cooperative cataloguing, but does so as part of the much larger network of OCLC WorldCat, and no longer has a Standards Committee (www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia).

In the last article of the last issue of Cataloguing Australia, ‘Hens or chooks? Internationalisation or a distinctive Australian bibliographic organisation practice’, Ross Harvey (1999a) noted the decision by Kinetica in the late 1990s to rein in ABN’s accommodation of LASH, and advocated instead for the continuation of bibliographic practices that were uniquely Australian, characterising these as an optimal mix of American and British approaches, enhanced by Australian innovation and by policies and standards that addressed local conditions, such as the use of Australian English. Unfortunately, in the main, it would appear that this call has not been heeded, as indicated by the decline in the level of cataloguing discussion and activity at a national level.

However, this does not mean that Australian librarianship has made no contributions to cataloguing and classification over the past two decades. As well as the continued work of ACOC and its members, various Australian institutions have made noteworthy contributions to bibliographic innovation, particularly if this is defined broadly. The NLA’s Trove (https://trove.nla.gov.au) is a very well regarded discovery tool, while its AustLit project remains one of the best examples of ‘FRBR-isation’ (Merčun, Žumer, & Aalberg, 2016). In the subject indexing arena, a number of valuable, home-grown controlled vocabularies, such as the Schools Online Thesaurus (http://scot.curriculum.edu.au), the Australian Government Interactive Functions Thesaurus (http://data.naa.gov.au/def/agift.html) and the Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors (http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/multites2007/index.html), continue to be used and extended.

The recent restructuring of RDA’s governance de-emphasises national interests in favour of broader, ‘regional’ input. Clearly, the move reflects a vision of RDA as a universal standard, applicable to cataloguing and bibliographic description throughout the world, including the non-English speaking world. In turn, this push reflects today’s bibliographic reality in which national boundaries are of decreasing importance: indeed, in the online world, these boundaries barely exist. Not only is it now more possible than ever for individual libraries to bypass national networks and share bibliographic data with international organisations such as OCLC, but a different model altogether, of metadata creation, is now beginning to emerge. This is a model that is more distributed and less centralised, and more conducive to the application of linked data technologies. In this new model, standards will still be crucial, but not particularly national. Instead, they are likely to be the product of dialogue within domains, such as the visual arts and museums community, the scientific community, the music community and so forth. With less incentive to standardise at the national level for infrastructural reasons, standards development can readily shift its focus to the resources themselves, the subject of the bibliographic data.

This trend does not mean, of course, that there are no longer any Australian- specific bibliographic issues to address. For example, Australian English continues to be spoken, and searched on, while Indigenous Australian culture still needs to be reflected in various knowledge organisation systems. In general, however, bibliographic practice will increasingly be about sharing resource description and metadata with people and computers, rather than with Australians or non-Australians. Australian metadata librarians will still be able to make contributions to policy and standards development, as well as to the pool of metadata itself, but in ways that, for the most part, transcend national boundaries. Instead of publishing in Cataloguing Australia, they can publish in Cataloguing & Classification Quarterly, or the Journal of Metadata Librarianship, for instance. Or, they can participate in international webinars, serve on an IFLA working party, and so on.

Conclusion

Australian librarianship has made significant contributions to international cataloguing policy and standards, especially over the past four decades. These contributions reflect the growing accessibility and scale, and thus value, of Australian cataloguing to the international community over this period. They have been the product, in large part, of the work of ACOC, and, indirectly, that of the erstwhile Cataloguers Section.

It is no coincidence that it was also about forty years ago when cooperative cataloguing really took off in Australia, via library automation and the MARC record format. Although in a sense this ‘revolution’ took a long time in the making, with central cataloguing and a national union catalogue suggested for Australia as far back as 1928, this does not mean that Australian libraries were particularly slow on the uptake, given the limited resources at their disposal relative to those of the American and British library communities. Rather, it means that for many decades Australian librarians and cataloguers shared a vision for efficient and effective cataloguing, if not the cataloguing itself. As such, they were nevertheless able to make some noteworthy contributions to the development of international standards even prior to the MARC era, albeit less systematically and more centred around specifically Australian concerns. It was, by the same token, reasonable for early Australian cataloguers to adopt existing codes that reflected publishing patterns and bibliographic outlooks that were very similar to those of their own environments.

With the era of national bibliographic standards transitioning to an era of global standards and global metadata exchange, opportunities are, if anything, increasing for information professionals and collecting institutions across Australia to play active and leading roles in furthering policy and practice in the information organisation field. Just as Australian libraries played their part in furthering bibliographic practices in the twentieth century, so too can they further the cause of metadata in the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to acknowledge the access provided by the Australian Library and Information Association to its archival materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip Hider

Philip Hider is Professor of Library and Information Management and Head of the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University. He publishes and researches primarily in the field of information organisation.