n.a document that analyzes and structures details about the formal elements of the materials, such as creator, title, dates, extent, and contents, to facilitate the identification, management, and understanding of the workPitti 1999The distinction between what and for whom libraries and archives remember accounts for the major differences in archival and bibliographic description. A bibliographic description, such as that found in a MARC record, represents an individual published item, and thus is item-level. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the description and the item. The description is based on, and is derived from, the physical item.the process of creating such a record
Notes
Bibliographic descriptions1 act as surrogates for the things described and are typically assembled into catalogs or bibliographies. Although the term’s etymology is tied to the concept of “book,” it is commonly used to refer to the process of creating similar catalogs or lists for other published and nonpublished formats, such as documents, photographs, and moving images, especially when the list contains several formats. Bibliographic description emphasizes the transcription of information found in the materials being described, although the bibliographer or cataloger may supply some explanatory notes.
