n December 2002, NLM announced its intention to delay implementation of a subset of the major-minor title change rules in Chapter 21 of the revised AACR2, see NLM Implementation of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition, 2002 Revision. NLM Tech Bull. 2003 Jan-Feb;(330):e5. . After careful consideration, the Library still maintains the position that MEDLINE indexing citations should reflect the actual title on the piece, as that is what the user sees and expects to find. When a so-called "minor" change affects the first word of a journal title, it has a significant impact on how that title will display in printed lists and bibliographies. Therefore, NLM is exploring ways to code its bibliographic records internally to allow other applications in the Library to extract a citation that will be identifiable to a user of its indexing services.

Whatever local changes are made, in the interest of national and international cooperative programs, NLM's bibliographic (cataloging) records distributed to licensees in MARC 21 format will not be affected and will adhere to the provisions of AACR2.

NLM has not yet encountered any titles that would fall under the rules in question. If any are encountered, they will be excluded from distribution until the Library's internal changes have been completed.

Diane L. Boehr
Cataloging Section

Boehr DL. Update on NLM's Position on the Application of Major-Minor Journal Title Change Rules. NLM Tech Bull. 2003 May-Jun;(332):e2.