ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 59| October 2002
Guidelines for Cataloguing Electronic Resources Available Online
The Kinetica Guidelines for Cataloguing Electronic Resources are now available online at: www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/dg_cer.html. The guidelines were developed by the Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Cataloguing of Electronic Resources in consultation with Kinetica users and provides guidance on creating and editing bibliographic records and holdings statements for electronic resources on the National Bibliographic Database (NBD)
At a meeting in July 2001 the Kinetica Advisory Committee recommended that Kinetica develop and promote guidelines to support the reporting of bibliographic records and holdings for electronic resources to the NBD. Draft guidelines were developed by Kinetica and an Expert Advisory Group was established to provide a framework for consultation with Kinetica users and further development of the guidelines. The group concluded its work and the final guidelines were released in July 2002.
The guidelines have been tailored to provide specific help with cataloguing remote access electronic resources and apply to a range of electronic resources including e-books, e-journals, titles supplied by aggregator services, databases, web sites, images, and sound files. The guidelines are not intended for use in the cataloguing of locally accessed electronic resources such as CD-ROMs or electronic resources that do not require a computer for access such as videodiscs. These guidelines are also intended as a guide to applying existing Kinetica cataloguing standards to electronic resources and are not a replacement for the existing standards.
The guidelines outline the preferred treatment of electronic resources on issues such as single or separate records to reflect electronic manifestations and their non-electronic counterparts, and recording holdings and electronic location and access details. The guidelines also encompass encoding and content required in other parts of the catalogue record and include examples of records for different types of electronic resources such as electronic journals, images and online databases and government publications.
Libraries are encouraged to employ the new guidelines and record their electronic resources on the NBD, even if the resources are not available for interlibrary loan.
Listing electronic resources will deliver many benefits for resource sharing:
For further information on the guidelines please contact Kinetica Customer
Support Tel: 1800 026 155; Email kinetica@nla.gov.au
—Bemal Rajapatirana
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au