245 Tag for General Material Designator (GMD)
Posted September 26, 2002
Revised March 5, 2003

245 $h[ ] contains the General Material Designation (GMD), a term indicating the broad class of material to which an item belongs. Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition (AACR2) dictates the terms that are used. 

GMDs used in the United States
braille
cartographic material (replaces globe and map*)
electronic resource (replaces computer file and interactive multimedia*)
equipment (INFOhio term, not AACR2**)
filmstrip
flash card
game
graphic
kit
manuscript
microform
microscope slide
model
motion picture
music
realia
slide
sound recording
text
toy
transparency
videorecording

* Per 2001 amendment to AACR2

** INFOhio has added [equipment] to the list of AACR2 terms. Equipment can now be used for hardware items that you wish to catalog and track via your database. Realia and the other terms that were used for equipment can now be replaced. Realia will now only be used for realia.

When cataloging equipment make sure you leave the date out of date1 and date2 in the 008 field. This ensures that your equipment record will not be loaded into INFOhio's K-12 Curriculum Resources Catalog (INFOhio's Union Catalog).

If you have consistently used a different term and wish to change all instances to “equipment," your DASite may be able to do this for you.

Icons used in CAT and CAT Jr. (December 24, 2002) Many schools use type "r" in the Leader to indicate equipment.