Bibliographic description of manuscripts: A recommended guide

Manuscripts, which are among the most important written cultural heritage items, are the mostly original sources that enable the transfer of the knowledge of the past to future generations. With technological developments, information centers today are adopting the approach of making information resources visible, making them available and making them accessible, rather than owning, protecting and preserving. For information centers that have manuscripts in their collections, this change will only be possible by making bibliographic descriptions of the works in accordance with international librarian standards. This study focuses on the bibliographic description of Eastern/Islamic manuscripts. The lack of a standardized approach to the bibliographic description of manuscripts in Turkey is a problem arising from many reasons. In addition to the lack of authority indexes, there are also technical problems such as the inability to determine how many manuscripts are in the collections of information centers that have manuscripts in their collections and what the physical, artistic and content characteristics of existing manuscripts are. There are also managerial problems such as leaving this work to the responsibility of people who are not trained in librarianship and who are not familiar with cataloging terminology. In order to correctly determine the qualification fields in the international cataloging rule AACR2 and metadata standards MARC and RDA for manuscripts and to reveal the meaningful relationship between the fields, the preparation of bibliographic records in accordance with the individual savings and their own habits should be prevented. This study proposes a practical guideline on "bibliographic description of manuscripts" in order to create standardized bibliographic records of manuscript collections in Turkey, taking into account their scientific and cultural characteristics.