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

    • Challenging our definition of published
    • 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
  • 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. FRBR and the new cataloguing rule Resource Description and Access (RDA) will move the focus from recording the manifestation in hand to recording entities and relate those entities to one another in order to describe the material – also in the national bibliography.
  • 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.