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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 49| February 2001
Cataloguing the web
Accessing resources on the web is a challenge for all libraries. Last November the Library of Congress took the lead and invited 100 librarians, information specialists, library suppliers and library system vendors to meet with 40 Library of Congress staff to address the challenge.
The buzzword of the conference was interoperability of systems and the bibliographic data used to access electronic resources. While libraries have enviable standards for description, classification and indexing, we need to review our professional practices to achieve closer interoperability with broader metadata standards such as Dublin Core. We also need interoperability of data relating to rights management, and interoperability of library cataloguing data and publishers data such as abstracts, indexes, tables of contents, promotional blurbs, authors portraits and mini-biographies.
The conference came up with practical recommendations for the Library of Congress to capture publishers data for re-purposing (another buzz word, meaning to reformat data so it may serve other purposes). The Library of Congress could capture descriptive data from electronic publishers, and reformat it to meet the purposes of Copyright, Cataloguing-in-Publication and ISSN.
The conference made specific recommendations for change to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) to accommodate access to multiple versions, such as print and electronic versions of an identical work. There seemed to be consensus at the conference that separate records for separate versions are essential for record exchange and data management. Users needs should be met by improving displays in online catalogues, so that multiple versions of a work are displayed more helpfully. The conference shorthand for this was separate records at global levellump display at local level.
Representing the National Library of Australia at the conference, I came away with the impression that the National Library is as well-advanced in its thinking about these issues as other organisations in North America. Indeed, we are a little ahead in practical experience. Delegates to the conference acknowledged the Librarys leading activity in digital preservation, including the PADI web site and the PANDORA digital archive. The Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources is already grappling with some of the difficult issues identified at the conference.
The conference reviewed 20 substantial papers and produced dozens of
resolutions to address the problems of bibliographic access to web
resources. The Library of Congress will take a leading role in carrying
these recommendations forward. The papers and resolutions are all
available on the web at lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/.
In the spirit of continuing access to web resources, the Library of
Congress has undertaken to archive the web site as well as the conference
discussion list which was very active in the weeks leading up to the
conference.
Julia Trainor
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au