Generally, titles can be divided into four types: ① titles, including titles, subheadings, series titles, etc. (2) The title of the person in charge (the title of the author) includes the individual names of the author, editor, annotator, translator and rewriter, as well as the collective names of organs, organizations and conferences. (3) Subject words, including all kinds of standardized words to express the subject content of literature. (four) classification titles, including various classification numbers indicating the scientific attributes of the literature content. The above four titles make the title a title, a responsibility title, a subject title and a classification title respectively. These items are composed of title directory, responsible person directory, subject directory and classification directory respectively.
Traditional literature description needs to determine a main title in the title and author's title to form the most complete main title, which can be used as the basis for making other titles and searching the books. In general, the author is the main title in the description of European and American documents, and the title is the main title in China. Because all the items in the machine-readable catalogue have the same details and can be searched quickly in many ways, the appearance of the machine-readable catalogue makes the concepts of "main title" and "headline" lose their original meaning. In China? Japan and other countries have successively abolished it. "General Book Description Rules" (Chinese National Standard) and "Japanese Catalogue Rules" both adopt alternate titles, that is, all the items to be inspected are concentrated on the inspection items, and there is no fixed main title. According to the needs of inspection, related inspection items can be added at the beginning of the description text of general items, thus forming various items. Europe, America, the Soviet Union and other countries still retain this concept due to traditional reasons.