The Application of AACR2’s Rules for Personal Names in Certain Languages

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules include special rules for personal name headings in certain languages under 22.21-22.28. This article investigates the extent to which four of these rules, pertaining to Indonesian, Malay, and Thai names, have been applied by catalogers contributing to the Australian National Bibliographic Database and discusses the value of these rules in the context of the general rules they supplement. It was found that many headings were not compliant with the rules, especially those resulting from English-language cataloging. Given catalogers’ apparent difficulty in applying the special rules, it is recommended that they be deleted, that the general rules be further generalized, and that more use is made of relevant linguistic and cultural resources