Final report on the work of the Anglo American cataloguing committee for cartographic materials.

In the six months since the report of the Committee's work appeared in The Globe no. 52 (June 2002) much has been achieved and this contributor can give a sigh of relief that the project on the revision of Cartographic Materials: a manual of interpretation for AACR2 has at last been completed. Work started on this process in early 1993 and was completed just prior to Christmas 2002. Tapes of the completed manuscript have been delivered to the publisher and we are awaiting notice of the probable date of publication.

The new edition of Cartographic Materials will be a much amplified version of the first edition which appeared in 1982. The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) was issued in a revised version in 1988 at which time it became critical that the manual of interpretation would need to be revised likewise. Apart from revising the existing text in the light of rule changes and amendments to the Anglo-American Rules since 1978, the committee has also incorporated additional rules to cover the treatment of early materials, aerial photography and remote sensing, and electronic resources. The committee also took steps to accommodate information prescribed by the US Federal Geographic Data Committee's (USFGDC) Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata. Simultaneously with the publication of the USFGDC standards the Canadians issued their Geomatic Data Sets Cataloguing Rules which also required evaluation for the AACCCM with regard to rule revisions necessary to describe digital spatial data.

During the revision process, four subcommittees were established to work on proposing new rules, applications and examples for electronic resources, remote sensing imagery and early materials. A further subcommittee worked on the glossary. Following the week-long meeting of the Committee in Washington, D.C. in September 1998 all this work has been carried out by email.

The new edition of Cartographic Materials will have twelve chapters and nine appendices. New appendices to be included are for Early Cartographic Materials, Electronic Resources and Remote-sensing Images. Other appendices have been rewritten and enlarged and incorporate useful tables to assist the cataloguer.

It is my firm belief that this will be an essential tool for all those cataloguers who aspire to catalogue cartographic material and I commend it to all libraries handling such materials.

Dorothy F. Prescott

AMC representative AACCCM

30 January 2003