Universal Bibliographic Control

The bibliographic control of documents at the international level has always been a problem. Librarians have been concerned about this problem which is increasing over the last five decades due to enormous increase in number of publications as well as variety of publications.

The effort for compilation of a Universal Bibliography has already been mentioned earlier.

Thus there are no known universal bibliographies as such. But after the second World War, UNESCO took leadership and emphasised that if all nations maintain their current national bibliographies, it might lead to having an efficient control on the publications universally. Several years have passed but still nothing concrete has come out of this.

The Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) programme sponsored by IFLA in 1974, appeared to be far more realistic, as it was based on the recognition of the fact that effective bibliographic control must begin within individual countries, and that the exchange of bibliographic information between them is facilitated if there is international agreement on bibliographical description. The UBC programme has since been merged with IFLA's another programme, nemed as the International MARC and is presently known as UBCIMP.

IFLA and UNESCO have also been in collaboration in this respect and their efforts have resulted in programmes like- International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), Inter-national Serials Data System (ISDS), Cataloguing-in-Publication CIP) and Union lists of Serials.