The practice of cataloguing is something that has always been an integral part of libraries and collections that maintain works of any kind. Many of these organizations and institutions have rules or practices to ensure that the works and objects being catalogued are consistent and can be found within the collection using different methods of tracking and locating.

While libraries around the world adopt and integrate technology into their systems and means of access, many once maintained their collections through the use of Card Catalogues. These carefully organized boxes filled with alphabetized cards contained the information for each book found within a libraries' collection for hundreds of years, used by organizations and private citizens alike. In some cases, the collection would be tracked in a catalogued book instead, making it portable and easier to replicate compared to hundreds of thousands of index cards.

The information found on the entries for each work generally consists of bibliographical information such as any standardized numbers or serials, the authors' and contributors' names and credits, and any alternative or translated titles for the work. Additionally, these entries would often include the physical descriptions for each resource in the collection. For example, it could indicate if a book would be placed in a different section because it did not fit on the shelf.

In the world of original cataloguing, there are rules and regulations that many catalogers and the libraries or organizations they work for comply with, ensuring consistency across collections found around the globe. In the 1960s, the MARC Standards for Bibliographic Data were created by Henriette Avram as a way of maintaining similar records across American libraries while making it machine-readable.

Out of this need for formatted entries of bibliographical information and data in cataloguing books and other resources were born multiple different methods of cataloguing, the two largest and most influential becoming known as AACR and RDA. The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules served as the long-standing guidelines from 1967 to 2005 until they were replaced by the Resource Description Access guidelines in favour of only requiring vital information in a record.

For a large part of Descriptive Cataloguing I, we focused on learning the subtle yet important differences between the two cataloguing languages and worked with the continually updating RDA style of formatting a record. To help myself better understand and remember the tags and subfields required during the course, I created a list with examples from the Library of Congress' database including some of my own from tests and assignments. Additionally, I formatted them in numerical order to make it readable as a checklist to ensure no information was missing or skipped over, as it could be detrimental to a collection.