General Notes in Catalog Records versus FRBR User Tasks

This article analyzes the literature concerning uses of notes in bibliographic records and also certain grammatical conventions used by catalogers to communicate information about the resources they are describing. It shows that these types of data do not aid the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) user tasks in the resource discovery process. It also describes how general notes are addressed in Resource Description Access (RDA), and advocates that cataloging practices involving most general notes and such conventions as bracketing and abbreviations should be discontinued with the widespread use of RDA