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About this Policy

Scope of Policy

This policy reflects and guides metadata description work (cataloguing) at CapU Library. Procedures which document associated daily work act in agreement with this policy.

Review Cycle

Policy will be reviewed and refreshed as needed. This version was last updated: Apr 16, 2025

Accountability

Policy is owned by the Metadata Strategies Librarian. Feedback from colleagues and users, directly or indirectly through faculty and staff, is welcomed. Contact the Metadata Strategies Librarian, Tamarack Hockin.

Guiding Principles

CapU Library cataloguing is guided by national and international industry standards, best practices from cataloguing communities of practice, and professional discourse on ethical and critical cataloguing practices. Our cataloguing is in service to our user communities.

Communities of Practice

We rely on expertise and information sharing from our professional communities of practice, and participate in these communities to enhance our metadata work and services.

Our communities offer guidance for interpretation and application of standards, as well as continued learning as standards and best practices evolve. Our communities publish and share metadata description sets and resources which bolster core services at our library.

We leverage the knowledge and resources available to us through our communities of practice to better serve our users, and we actively share our knowledge and resources in return so these communities can continue to thrive.

Compliance with Standards

Established metadata standards enable interoperability, and work in tandem with communities of practice to support information sharing.

We pursue compliance with cataloguing standards because well-formed metadata description supports our users in seeking and exploring information resources in our library. Objectives of our core standards are fundamentally in service of user tasks for information seeking.

Critical Cataloguing

We also recognize that many of the standards we use for description reflect biased, oppressive systems and worldviews which cause harms and impede access for our users. We actively work to remediate these harms through systemic, sustainable changes to our metadata.

Standards and best practices will continue to change over time, and are evolving to respect under-represented and marginalized users and communities. We participate in shaping the iterative evolution of these standards and practices by engaging in critical discourse and other work with our communities of practice and in other professional spheres.

Critical cataloguing is one aspect of library work which seeks to redress harms created and perpetuated by our profession.

Service to our Users

We serve our users through well-formed metadata description, and through knowledgeable and critical application of the resources we rely on to do this work. We catalogue with consistency and sufficiency to enable user discovery and access of information resources at our library. We are responsive to changing user needs, and implement changes to better support our user communities.

“All our rules and standards should be considered floors, not ceilings. They should be seen as the minimum required, not limits on known information which would be of help to patrons.”

Local Cataloguing Practices

Local cataloguing procedures and metadata specifications exist to provide trustworthy documentation of how the work gets done. They document steps to achieve a task, standards for description, and other information that reflects local decisions as well as information that cannot be reasonably assumed as common knowledge.

It is primarily the responsibility of the Metadata Librarian to guide change in cataloguing practice, as this position is charged with professional expertise in this area. However, it is primarily the responsibility of the TS Supervisor to operationalize changes (i.e., changes which affect workflow and workload), so planning for changes is consultative and collaborative.

It is primarily the responsibility of the Cataloguer to maintain accuracy in the documentation, as those who do the work are best situated to identify a mismatch between what is documented and the real-world processes. (For example, when an application tools menu changes.)

Local Documentation

Our documentation exists to supplement and clarify where a complete authoritative source cannot be linked to. Cataloguers are expected to be sufficiently trained and familiar with correct standards application and current cataloguing practices; documenting or defining this completely is beyond the scope of our documentation.

Local documentation provides:

  • Interpretation of standards and established decisions around cataloguing practice.

  • Conventions for specific library collections.

  • Additional information for ILS fields (i.e., non-MARC)

  • Locally defined MARC fields

  • Anytime local practice diverges from the standard (e.g., a field is removed to accommodate our ILS or Discovery)

Authoritative External Sources

Our cataloguing relies on many authoritative sources of documentation external to the library. When creating or updating our local documentation, apply the following principles:

  • Standards may be linked to for convenience, where links are useful and additive.

  • Partial transcription (copying) of the source documentation may also be included for convenience. However, these transcriptions must be kept updated as standards change. Best practice is to include a link alongside any transcription.

  • Where a local copy of complete external documentation is useful for cataloguing (if it can’t be easily referred to in an external link), the guiding principle is to ensure that any shared documentation on the wiki is kept updated. If you created it, then you maintain it.

Appendices

The following appendices provide non-exhaustive documentation of foundational standards and resources in relation to this policy. Additional resources (e.g., schema, vocabulary, communities) may be included in practice, and their exclusion from this list may be simply an oversight.

Standards 

Descriptive Cataloguing: CapU Library collections are catalogued in MARC21 format. We apply Resource Description and Access (RDA) guidance and associated policies in order to construct well-formed metadata description sets.

Classification: Items are classified according to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system, applying class modifications from Library and Archives Canada. 

Controlled Vocabulary & Authorized Headings: Entries for names, subjects, and titles are controlled and authorized by a variety of issuing bodies, including:

  • Library of Congress (LC): Name Authority File (LCNAF), Demographic Groups Terms (LCDGT), Subject Headings (LCSH), Genre Fiction Terms (LCGFT), and Children and Youth Subject Headings.

  • Library and Archives Canada: Canadian Subject Headings (CSH)

  • Répertoire de vedettes-matière (RVM)

  • Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)

  • International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI)

  • Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST)

  • Homosaurus Linked Data Vocabulary.

  • Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)

  • Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

  • Book Industry Standards and Communications Subject Headings (BISAC)

Communities of Practice

Program for Cooperative Cataloguing, Library of Congress (LC-PCC)

Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC)

  • OLAC is our preferred guidance for film, non-musical audio, and multimedia cataloguing best practice.

  • OLAC Inc. - Home

Music Library Association (MLA)

Additional communities of practice

Ethical Guidance

The Cataloguing Code of Ethics

  • Created by representatives from three national organizations, including the Cataloguing and Metadata Standards Committee (CMSC) of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA-FCAB). The Code was endorsed by CFLA in 2024: Position Papers

  • Cataloguing Code of Ethics ; Statements of Ethical Principles (p. 3)

Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (ICP)

  • Published in 2016 by the International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions, and based on the Paris Principles from the 1961 International Conference on Cataloguing Principles. The ICP also informs the objectives and principles governing Official RDA.

  • Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (ICP) ; General Principles (p. 5).

Contact

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