The Regeln für die alphabetische KatalogisierungorRAK (also known as Regeln der alphabetischen Katalogisierung, translating as: Rules for alphabetical cataloging) are a bibliographic cataloging set of rules. The RAK rules appeared for the first time in 1976 and became the dominant set of rules in Germany and Austria in the 1980s.
The theoretical model on which the RAK rules were based on are the "Paris Principles" (PP), drawn up in 1961 at a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), which has existed since 1971, formed the further basis for the RAK.
Like their counterpart from the English-speaking world, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR), the RAK rules are very complex and, despite their suitability for creating electronic library catalogs, they are still strongly oriented towards card catalogs. Forms of headings in the original language of the medium to be cataloged and a priority of purely formal decision-making criteria, for example when a corporation is chosen as the main entry, are characteristic for RAK.
Since 2015, the RAK is being replaced by the international Resource Description and Access (RDA) set of rules.
The first edition of the RAK appeared in 1976 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR/DDR) and a year later in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG/BRD). They formed the long-awaited replacement of the outdated Preußische Instruktionen (PI) (English: Prussian instructions), introduced in 1899 and expanded by DIN 1505 in 1932.[1]
The development of a fundamentally renewed revision called RAK2 was discontinued in the course of the discussion about switching to AACR2. The successor to AACR2 is the Resource Description and Access (RDA) set of rules.
Originally there was only one uniform RAK edition with alternative regulations for different requirements or library types. Due to the different requirements, the alternative regulations were recorded in different sets of rules for scientific libraries (RAK-WB) and public libraries (RAK-ÖB), and further regulation works for special types of media were developed:
The formal cataloging rules are specified in DIN 1505:
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