International recommendations - 2010 - New factors

New Factors

• 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.

Bibliography, Best practices

Last update: 5 December 2017