Cataloguing the Slavonic Manuscript Collection of the Plovdiv Public Library – Problems and MARC 21* Solutions

MARC 21 (‘Machine-Readable Cataloguing’) is a US library standard established worldwide and recently translated also in Bulgarian (those parts used most by librarians in their everyday work). The Bulgarian translations are freely available on the NALIS website (http://www.nalis.bg/) under the Library Standards Section, where also an Online Multilingual Dictionary of MARC 21 Terms can be found. All these works are approved by the US Library of Congress and published on its MARC 21 website under Translations (http://www.loc.gov/marc/translations.html#bulgarian).

The paper presents a standardised scheme for describing the whole Slavonic Manuscript Collection kept at the Plovdiv Public Library. This scheme will be used for generating a structured pool of palaeographic and codicological data with a view to integrating the respective digital objects (digitised copies of the respective manuscripts and metadata, i.e. the descriptions, to them) into a digital content management platform. The experience gained in creating the catalogue of the Plovdiv Library’s Slavonic Manuscripts may be useful when discussing a unified methodology and a scheme for a machine-readable cataloguing of the Bulgarian manuscript collections in general. Besides, the principles of adapting the proposed standard to MARC 21 Bibliographic are enlisted. The template prepared, will be applied in ALEPH 500 and further developed in a related forthcoming activity.