Cataloguing is, for he most part, carried out in accordance with the “Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung in wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken“ [RAK-WB] which are the generally recognised rules for he cataloguing of scientific libraries in the German speaking area whereby these rules are comparable and partially correspond with “Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules” [AACR] and also “Regeln für die Katalogisierung alter Drucke” [RAK-WB Alte Drucke] which are also comparable with AACR. The latter set of contains rules extended to cover the specific requirements of the cataloguing of early printed materials.
In the EHB project the rules have been extended to include printing up to the year of publication 1850. This is appears reasonable in order to apply a unified bibliographical matrix to the entire period to be catalogued. Specifically this refers to the waiving of rules applying to abbreviations in author and publisher designations, the use of upper and lower case in correspondence with the article to be catalogued as well as orthographic standardisation. In Italy, in accordance with Presidential Decree 189 dated 16th May 2000, the limit for the cataloguing of historic collections is set at 70 years prior to indexing. For South Tyrol, due to various criteria, this means an indexing limitation at 1945. Whereby, this restriction is no longer applicable for valuable collections.
A fingerprint is determined for printed material up to year of publication 1800. This is a sequence of characters taken from a predefined page of the book. In this way varying printed editions of the book can be recognised. A further special characteristic is the consideration of personal details within the bibliographic description. Therefore, to some extent, the catalogue entry provides information about the author [religious congregation, honorary titles etc.].