Librarians in charge of collection development require national bibliographies (both local and foreign) to:

  • Analyse available publications
  • Select according to collection development criteria
  • Become aware of future publications (e.g. via CIP records)

Information requirements from the national bibliography

To be useful for collection development, a national bibliography should offer subject access together with analysis of different aspects of publications.

Descriptive metadata requirements (for offline files or printed national bibliographies):

Complete bibliographic records should be presented as results. A link to further publisher data is also necessary in order to obtain:

  • Price
  • Availability (publication status)
  • Terms and conditions (rights, technical requirements)

Search requirements (for online national bibliographies):

Typical access points required for collection development activities include:

  • Subject headings, classification, keywords for searching on topics
  • Date of publication
  • Language/country of publication
  • Publication type/genre/format

Sorting on several criteria is required for large result sets and meaningful clustering (e.g. using FRBR) is helpful.