Presentation delivered to The Irish Universities Information Services Colloquium (IUISC), 4th-6th March 2009, Galway, Ireland. 2009-03-05.

1. Resource Description and New Media:
Challenges and Opportunities
Eoin McCarney & Hugh Murphy
UCD Library
UCD Library Leabharlann UCD

2. Overview
• Outline of Project
• What & Why?
• Decisions
• Issues & Outcomes
• Future plans

3. The Project Goals
• Catalogue our entire collection of E-Books
• Catalogue a series of UCD podcasts

6. Why describe new media?
• User demand
• Raise awareness
• To see how it can best be done
• Get best value from resources

7. What should a Library catalogue
contain?
• Print, Electronic, Both?
• Standards
• Format Agnostic?
• What we own or what users want to access?

8. Who can say which new media will
take off?

9. It’s easy to get carried away..
“By the turn of the century, paper
will satisfy less than 5 percent of
the total commerce in
information. Although education
and entertainment have their own
migratory paths and rates, the
objective will be the same: paper
is going to be replaced with
electronic media”
(Kounta, J. (1992). Tomorrow’s libraries: More
than a modular telephone jack, less than a
complete revolution - Perspectives of a
provocateur. Library Hi-Tech, 10(4), 39-50.
1992, p. 39)

10. …or have we reached the tipping
point?

11. JISC National E-books Observatory Project: Findings from the First User Survey,
CIBER, 2008.

12. Apple
iPhone
Amazon
Kindle
Sony
E-Book
Reader

15. The ins and outs

16. E-Books
Good Not so Good
• Available to user, • Reading from print is still
anytime, anywhere the preferred choice for
• Much greater most.
functionality – cross • Multiple packages =
referencing, links to divergent collections,
other sources, advanced licenses, search
searching. techniques, business
models.
• Huge benefits in storage
and maintenance • A large challenge for
resource description,
especially in light of
changing options

17. E-Books - Early Decisions:
• Give E-Books a separate catalogue
record
• Authority control not viable
• Bulk editing and broad QA of records
required

18. Issues
• Sheer Volume – justifying the time
• Standards
• Moveable feast
• Authentication
• Assessing usage

22. Outcomes:
• Increased usage
• Reinforces new media
• Endorses the catalogue and retains its relevance
• Reduced authority control
• Maintenance issues (Books 24/7)

23. Podcasts
a “radio-style” program, usually in the MP3 digital
format, disseminated over the Internet, that
includes a system for subscribing to it on a World
Wide Web page in such a manner that future
programs are automatically downloaded.
Subscribers typically transfer downloaded files to
their portable media players, such as Apple Inc.’s
iPod and the Microsoft Corporation’s Zune, for
later playback. The name podcast derives from a
combination of iPod and broadcast.
Britannica

25. Podcasts – Issues
• The lawless, wild west of cataloguing – little or no
standards
• Proliferation of podcasts – what merits inclusion
in catalogue?
• Potential to be seen as a diminution of the
catalogue (“Podcasts? Really?!”)
• Assessing usage

27. Outcomes:
• Increased usage?
• Reinforces new media
• Enhances relevance of library and catalogue
• Maintenance issues (dynamic medium)

28. Overall Conclusions
• Some precedents for e-books, none for podcasts
• New paradigm and technology for new media.
• Massive consequences, both for collection
development and resource description – where
does it stop
• People still use the catalogue (which is good) so
(as ever) the catalogue has to represent what we
have (which is complicated)
• Going forward, other solutions may prove to be
more appropriate

29. The Future?
• Single Search interface across all media
• Primo, Encore, Vufind etc
• Is resource description cost effective?

30. Questions?