Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Policy Statements

RBMS Policy Statements

The RBMS Policy Statements are maintained by the RBMS RDA Editorial Group, a subgroup of the Bibliographic Standards Committee (BSC) of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). The statements provide guidance on the description of rare materials typically found in rare book, manuscript, and special collections repositories. The term "rare materials" refers to any special materials that repositories have chosen to distinguish from general materials by the ways in which they house, preserve, or collect them.

The RBMS Policy Statements are based on Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (DCRMR), an open-source, integrating resource that will be updated over time. DCRMR is an RDA-aligned revision of a suite of manuals published as Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (DCRM), which cover various formats of rare materials. The current version of DCRMR includes instructions for the description of rare books only. As instructions for additional formats (e.g., rare graphics) are incorporated into DCRMR from the original DCRM suite, the scope of the RBMS Policy Statements will expand accordingly. The Preface and Changelog of DCRMR provide the most current information about the standard and what it covers.

Most of the RBMS Policy Statements are brief, concise statements that provide guidance on the application of options in the RDA Toolkit. All of the statements include hyperlinked citations to relevant instructions in DCRMR for further information. Because all of the RBMS Policy Statements map to instructions in DCRMR, their coverage is limited to the scope of DCRMR. For example, DCRMR focuses primarily on the manifestation and item entities and includes very little guidance about agent entities and access points. Accordingly, a majority of the RBMS Policy Statements are limited to manifestation- and item-level elements in RDA.