IFLA Guidelines for Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) Displays

Existing Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) demonstrate differences in the range and complexity of their functional features, terminology, and help facilities. While many libraries already have OPACs, there is a need to bring together, in the form of guidelines or recommendations, a corpus of good practice to assist libraries in designing or re-designing the displays for their OPACs, taking into consideration the needs of users. The audience for these guidelines is librarians charged with customizing OPAC software and vendors and producers of this software. The guidelines are mainly designed for general libraries with collections of resources in the humanities, the social sciences, and the pure and applied sciences. The guidelines are intended to apply to any type of catalogue, independently of the kind of interface and technology used.

Résumé

The IFLA Series on Bibliographic Control was formerly known as the UBCIM series (Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC ). It consists of reports reflecting the ongoing process towards International Cataloguing Principles, which began in 2003. Through the series of meetings represented by each volume the reader will be able to track the development and consultation taking place throughout different parts of the world that will culminate with the creation of a truly international set of principles to guide the development of cataloguing codes worldwide.