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Archive cataloguing
  • Introduction
  • General Guidance
    • Basic cataloguing principles
    • Preparing a collection for cataloguing
      • Audio-visual cataloguing
      • Born-digital cataloguing
  • Quick Reference
    • Mandatory cataloguing fields
      • Mandatory born-digital fields
      • Mandatory visual and material culture fields
    • Additional cataloguing fields
    • Releasing the catalogue: Checklist
  • Metadata fields
    • Introduction
    • IDENTITY
    • CONTEXT
    • CONTENT
    • ACCESS
    • ALLIED MATERIALS
    • Digitisation sensitivity review fields
    • Superseded fields
  • Authorities
    • Name Authority Files
      • Personal name authority files
      • Corporate name authority files
    • Subject Authority Files
  • Appendices
    • Appendix 1: Acceptable date formats
    • Appendix 2: Acceptable extent formats
    • Appendix 3: Terminology resources
  • CATALOGUING PROJECTS
    • Adamson Collection review 2023-2025
      • Background and existing cataloguing
      • Approach
      • Access and Sensitivity Decision Making
      • Cataloguing Workflow
      • Picklist Data
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On this page
  • ISAD(G)
  • Level of detail
  • Arrangement
  • Sensitivity review
  • Formats
  • Names
  • Subjects
  • Citations
  • Formatting and inputting data

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  1. General Guidance

Basic cataloguing principles

ISAD(G)

Cataloguing at Wellcome is carried out in accordance with the basic principles set out in . In line with ISAD(G), every piece of archival description must include the basic minimum 5 specified in ISAD(G) 1st edition:

  • Reference (must be unique)

  • Title, or brief description (more detailed description should be put in the description field)

  • Extent (some indication of the bulk of the material)

  • Date(s) of material

  • Level of description (namely, is this a collection-level description, a series heading, a producible item, a piece within a producible item, etc.).

ISAD(G) 2nd edition also mandates creator name as a compulsory field all the way through a catalogue. Current Wellcome practice varies slightly from this; creator name is mandatory at Collection level only but should be used at lower levels to describe material that has a different, significant creator or at item level for visual and material culture described as individual objects.

ISAD(G) specifies that information is inherited from higher levels of the catalogue. Wellcome broadly adheres to this principle and consequently cataloguers should not repeat at lower levels any administrative or biographical background material found in the collection level record that applies to the whole collection.

However, to facilitate online searching, we depart from the inheritance principle and set out some information at item level which, according to ISAD(G), need not be there: this includes repeating full names rather than abbreviations, and using titles that are understandable when viewed outside the context of the archive hierarchy.

Fields that map to ISAD(G) are given in square brackets throughout this cataloguing manual.

Level of detail

The catalogue is a finding aid to the material described and not a substitute for consulting the archives. The aim is to provide enough information and keywords for a researcher to locate material, assess its relevancy and make sense of it in its context.

Arrangement

Cataloguers are strongly advised to sort material and arrange things into order before listing in detail.

Always take your lead from the material itself. Avoid format-based arrangement. Preserving provenance and existing arrangement should be the priority, even if it seems illogical. This applies to digital as well as analogue material. Arranging digital material in its own section may be appropriate due to its provenance but should not be undertaken because of format.

Wellcome uses the term Item to represent the producible unit: the thing that a researcher can order and consult, such as a file or volume (called file in ISAD(G)). We no longer catalogue to levels below item-level (i.e. piece-level)

Sensitivity review

Formats

Some archive collections contain other, non-paper, formats such as visual material, audio-visual material and born-digital material. Where these are identified within an archive collection, the first step should be to decide whether to retain the material intellectually within the archive (and thus catalogue archivally) or extract it and catalogue it as a free-standing item within the library catalogue. The decision should be based on a number of factors:

  • Is the archival context integral to understanding and interpreting the material?

  • Would the material benefit from granular item level cataloguing achieved via library cataloguing?

  • Would we seek to acquire this material for our library holdings even if we did not hold the archive?

Many of the standard archive cataloguing fields apply to non-paper archives. There is also a separate, more in depth cataloguing framework for visual and material culture and a cataloguing manual for audio-visual media to ensure format-specific metadata is created consistently across our collections and cataloguing systems.

Names

Wellcome follows the standard form of names set out in Resource Description and Access (RDA) - check with colleagues to get the username and password. This standard replaces the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2). There will still be names within the catalogue that follow AACR2, or that are hybrid between AACR2 and RDA, but all new cataloguing should follow RDA rules. The library catalogue should be consulted and checked before creating any new name authority for either the Creator_Name field, or when adding to the authorities database.

Subjects

Wellcome uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) for medical concepts and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) for non-medical concepts.

Citations

Titles of books and journals should be in italics, while titles of articles should be given in double inverted commas. It is essential that inverted commas are properly closed: failure to do so may cause system crashes when data is exported.

Examples of citation style

  • Monograph: Thomas Newton, A History of Surgery (London: Penguin, 1954).

  • Journal: British Medical Journal.

  • Journal article: Thomas Newton, “Notes on medieval surgical techniques”, British Medical Journal vol.200 no.1 (1997).

  • Journal article mentioning book: Gordon Watson, “Illustration techniques in Gray’s Anatomy”, British Medical Journal vol.200 no.1 (1997).

  • Journal article mentioning article: Gordon Watson, “Questions raised by Newton’s ‘Notes on medieval surgery’”, British Medical Journal vol.200 no.1 (1997).

Formatting and inputting data

Formatting within a field (e.g. bold, italics, paragraphs, lists) can be added to the public online catalogue by using HTML tags. See the CALM User Guide for instructions of how to use HTML tags and make them visible when viewing a catalogue record.

Pasting in large amounts of text from MS Office should be avoided. The coding used for some punctuation (e.g. dashes) is not always recognised and can consequently display as an unknown character, unfindable by searches. Pasting in small chunks of text can be manually checked and it is the best way to add accents.

For quotations, use double inverted commas rather than single.

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Last updated 15 days ago

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The default position is that all material should be open: cataloguers need to have a reason for restricting, closing, or putting any other access barriers on material. See the internal for guidance on how to conduct sensitivity reviews and make sensitivity decisions.

Sensitivity and Access Procedures