The peculiarities of the online public access catalogue in the art library

Online public access catalogue in the Russian State Art Library, Moscow (RSAL), which was founded as theatrical library, has some peculiarities because of both the specifics of its collections and specifics of its readers requests. To fulfil the readers requests, RSAL developed the methodology of subject description and provided the search abilities in the online catalogue, including search with the use of the authority file.

This paper describes some aspects of this methodology, explains what decisions on approach to subject description were made in RSAL and why. Problems that are covered in this paper include unified search, wide and narrow subject headings, subject search on pictorial materials database, authority file and document preservation passport. The methodology is illustrated with several examples.