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New guidelines for cataloguing of electronic resources

In July 2006 an Expert Advisory Group (EAG) was established to review and update the Libraries Australia guidelines for the cataloguing of electronic resources, and to advise on actions that Libraries Australia could take to improve library workflows for managing access to e-resources.

The review is now completed, and the EAG has issued the new Guidelines for Cataloguing Remote Access Electronic Resources—available from the Libraries Australia website, at: http://www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/dg_raer.html

The guidelines were developed in consultation with Libraries Australia users. They provide advice when cataloguers are creating or editing bibliographic and holdings statements for remote access electronic resources. The new guidelines consolidate, extend and replace the following previously and separately issued electronic resources:

  • Guidelines for cataloguing of electronic resources
  • Guidelines for the Cataloguing of E-Book resources
  • Guidelines for electronic resource holdings statements on the NBD

The main changes from previous guidelines are as follows:

  • adoption of an aggregator-neutral record policy
  • recommended and preferred use of persistent identifiers in the electronic location field (865)
  • the requirement for availability notes in holdings statements only when items are not available for document delivery or have other access restrictions
  • the option to include an extent statement for remote access materials
  • optional inclusion of the electronic location field (856) when using the additional physical form note (530) when describing both the original and alternate form in a single record
  • systems requirements notes only for detailing special access requirements and not for standard browser access
  • inclusive examples for a range of material types (e.g. monographs, journals, theses)
  • the practice of using a series added entry field (830) to aggregate records within datasets will be discontinued.

Libraries are encouraged to use these revised guidelines. Your feedback is welcome, and can be provided to Libraries Australia via the Help Desk on 1800 026 155, or by email to: librariesaustralia@nla.gov.au.

Rob Walls
Director, Database Services
Libraries Australia