• AACR2 – Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2^nd edition, used since January, 1981 as the basic guideline for cataloging practice in libraries.

• Access Points – Any name, word, or phrase by which a catalog record for an item can be retrieved from the catalog; also known as an entry, heading, or retrieval point. Main entries, added entries, and subject entries are examples of access points.

• ASCII – is a character encoding based on the Englishh alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings—which support many more characters than did the original—have a historical basis in ASCII.

• Authority Control - - is a term used in library and information science to refer to the practice of creating and maintaining headings for bibliographic material in a catalog. Authority control fulfills two important functions. First it enables catalogers to disambiguate items with similar or identical headings. For example, two authors who happen to have published under the same name can be distinguished from each other by adding middle initials, birth and/or death (or flourished, if these are unknown) dates, or descriptive epithet to the heading of one (or both) authors. Second, authority control is used by catalogers to collocate materials that logically belong together, although they present themselves differently. For example, authority records are used to establish uniform titles, which can collocate all versions of a given work together even when they are issued under different titles.

• Automation - Changing from manual, paperbased methods of recording, organizing, and retrieving information to computerized systems. Circulation control and cataloging are among the most widely automated library functions.

• Bibliographic Records - a catalog record corresponding to a book or other item in the library's collection.

• Call Numbers (Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress), Cutter Tables and Numbers - Set of symbols which identifies an item in a library collection and indicates its location. Usually, a combination of classification and author designations.

• Catalog - a file of bibliographic records which describes a set of resources contained in library's collection. The catalog may include other types of records as well, such as authority records and on-order records.

• CIP – Cataloging in Publication are records that are created when a publisher either sends LC a draft of a book that hasn’t been published yet or fills out a form with information about the book. LC makes a cataloging record from that draft or form and sends it to the publisher, which prints a copy of the LC record in the book when it is published.

• Copy Cataloging - A term used for the process of acquiring existing MARC records  by another library or agency and using or adapting them for use as your own.  

• Dewey Decimal Classification – A subject classification system for books developed by Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) that divided all knowledge into ten classes arranged in numeric sequence and further divided by a decimal system.

• Descriptive Cataloging -  the aspect of cataloging concerned with the bibliographic and physical description of a book, recording, or other work, accounting for such items as author or performer, title, edition, and imprint as opposed to subject content.

• URL - stands for uniform resource locator and is used to locate addresses on the world wide web.

• FTP - File Transfer Protocol makes it possible to send data contained in files between computers.

• General Material Designation – It is a subfield h of MARC field 245 that should appear in square brackets immediately following the title proper, because its purpose is to identify the broad class of material to which an item belongs and to distinguish between different forms of the same work at an early stage in the description. It precedes any other title information, such as a subtitle. Use of the GMD text is optional. Most agencies do not use it for books, because library users normally assume that the record describes a book.

• ISBD – a set of cataloging rules called the International Standard Bibliographic Description; ISBN -ISBN - International Standard Book Number: An internationally agreed on standard number that identifies a book uniquely. In the United States, these are obtained from the R.R. Bowker Company.

          ISSN International Standard Serial Number: An internationally agreed on standard number that identifies a serial     

          publication uniquely. In the U.S. ISSNs are assigned by the Library of Congress.

• Library of Congress Classification - classification system that was first developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to organize and arrange the book collections of the Library of Congress. Over the course of the twentieth century, the system was adopted for use by other libraries as well, especially large academic libraries in the United States. It is currently one of the most widely used library classification systems in the world. The Library's Cataloging Policy and Support Office maintains and develops the system, posting weekly lists of updates on its Web site.

• OCLC - an online utility used by many libraries for cataloging purposes, headquartered in Dublin, Ohio.

• Retrospective Conversion - Retrospective conversion is the process of turning a library's existing paper catalog records into machine-readable form. Retrospective conversion usually entails using catalog cards to find or create bibliographic records in a database of machine-readable records, such as OCLC (WorldCat), and bringing those records into the existing local database.

• Sears' List of Subject Headings - For 80 years, Sears List of Subject Headings has served the needs of small and medium-sized libraries, delivering a basic list of essential headings, together with patterns and examples to guide the cataloger in creating further headings as needed. Practical features include a thesaurus-like format, an accompanying list of cancelled and replacement headings, and legends within the list that identify earlier forms of headings.

• Pre-cataloged Records – These are MARC records that are sent to the library media specialist by the jobber or vendor via CD or the internet. MARC records via these two methods can be imported into the library automation system.