All that’s necessary, to become a member of PORBASE is to respect several rules and regulations concerning bibliographic description and subject representation as defined in the PORBASE Statement of Principles:
• Rules and format for bibliographic description : UNIMARC is PORBASE´s readable computer format, for bibliographic and authority records. The bibliographic description follows the Portuguese Cataloguing Rules (RCP, reimp. 1996) - that follow the ISBD – International Standard Bibliographic Description - that are based on the AACR2 – Anglo-American Catloguing Rules.
• Subject Representation: The UDC – Universal Decimal Classification - is the common directive adopted so as to retrieve records by subject.
For the meantime, only the use of the UDC guarantees a consistent information recovery throughout the database. Although the subject search by descriptors, headers or key words is also possible it must be taken into consideration that due to the fact that the alphabetical subject index is not yet controlled a coherent and exhaustive information recovery cannot be guaranteed.
In the ambit of the CLIP project, terminology lists for indexing the topics of Fine Arts, Agriculture and Health Sciences are available. These should be used by the cooperating libraries that intend their descriptors and subject headings to be integrated into PORBASE.
Rules and Regulations Guide
