Making Decisions When Cataloging Bound-with Books

Frequently, bound-with books are the subject of catalog clean-up projects, often discovered years after first being added to a collection as a monograph. Alternately, bound-with books may have a structure that works within one library system, but become a persistent thorn in the side when migrating to a new system that models them differently. This only compounds the existing descriptive challenges of cataloging them, and can become a paralyzing state of affairs for catalogers. Decision-making guidance is needed because these resources are highly inconsistent in their composition and official cataloging standards for bound-with books have varied widely over the lifetime of the MARC format. This paper provides a general description of bound-with books, their importance as library resources, and outlines guidance for cataloging decisions.