New Factors

Contents

  • Web publishing, new formats and media have changed the scope of the ‘national published output’ by:

    • Lowering the barriers to publication
    • Offering even individual publishers a global reach
    • Raising user expectations on instant access to content rather than just a description of it.
  • Traditional cataloguing practices, predicated on book-in-hand analysis of resources by professional staff, are not scalable to the new era of Web and electronic publishing.
  • The proliferation of digital media and formats raise new challenges for the organisation and presentation of information and provision of access
  • National bibliographic agencies must target increasingly limited resources as efficiently as possible to achieve comprehensive coverage while satisfying existing user needs
  • Electronic resources pose new challenges for resource description and access since they may:
  • Be related to existing printed resources, but differ in scope or content
  • Be available in multiple formats
  • Contain multiple components
  • Be constantly updated.
  • However, since IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is derived from a detailed analysis of resource discovery user tasks it has identified the basic metadata structures required to support resource discovery and could be used to address this growing requirement.
  • The confusing multiplicity of resources to be conveyed to users in a meaningful way creates new challenges for those developing online bibliographic services or supporting resource discovery using national bibliographic records.