Scope and purpose of AUTOCAT

The chief advantage of Autocat, as of all such lists, is that it expands the pool of knowledgeable people to whom an individual can turn for help, easily and quickly. A cataloger faced with a publication in, what to that library, is a very exotic language for which it lacks adequate resources can get help; e.g., one library helped another in cataloging a work in Zulu while a bit earlier a library in Finland helped a library in Mississippi catalog a work in Estonian. Questions on interpretation of AACR2r, organization of technical services units, appropriate MARC coding, formulation of subject headings, appropriate class numbers in LCC or DCC, announcements of forthcoming meetings, reports of past meetings, announcements of job openings, the conditions under which Minimal Level Cataloging should be applied, the use of Core Level records, how to describe the pagination of an unpaged volume, sexism in LC subject headings, these and other topics are all grist for Autocat's mill.

Since AUTOCAT has subscribers at the Library of Congress and other national bibliographic centers as well as at the major utilities, questions relating to the policies or practices of those institutions often generate official responses. Subscribers consist both of recognized cataloging experts and novices in their first job but all have something they can contribute.

The following are outside of AUTOCAT's scope and should be referred to more appropriate lists: