Fluxion-structures: records for remote access electronic resources

Abstract

At the 2003 ARLIS/UK & Ireland Annual Conference, Creative partnerships, at the University of Sussex, a workshop entitled Documenting electronic resources: standards and challenges attracted delegates interested in exploring the practical and theoretical issues raised by cataloguing electronic resources in traditional library environments. This article further details recent changes made to the Anglo-American cataloguing rules to accommodate various types of e-resources. While quasi-established methods of representing such resources have undergone substantial revision, new metadata schemes are emerging and divisions between respective repositories containing different material types are disintegrating. Adapted or entirely new workflows for managing cataloguing of e-resources are under development (TrackER) and a fundamental restructuring of the very framework for relating data in bibliographic records to the needs of users (FRBR) may impact significantly on the representation of e-resources in library OPACs. Do these developments in any sense touch the library user whose ‘infosphere’ is underpinned by the seamlessness of Google’s PageRank algorithm and will the Research Libraries Group’s pilot service RedLightGreen sufficiently ‘Google-ize’ what libraries provide for these users?