End-users

Contents

End-users have not always been considered a priority audience. However, the IFLA Standing Committee affirms the importance of the national bibliography as a key cultural heritage resource and recommends that measures are taken to ensure public access to the information.

This category includes a highly varied range of users including:

  • Library patrons
  • Online users wishing to find and identify publications
  • Formal or informal groups and corporate bodies.

Numerous potential usage examples exist e.g.:

  • Printers identifying publishers to offer cooperation
  • Journalists to identify language/genre/origin patterns in publications
  • Organisers of book fairs
  • Identification of translators from/to specific language
  • Identification of illustrators

Information requirements from the national bibliography

End-users primarily need to obtain information on:

  • Authors and their publications
  • Subjects

In order to:

  • Identify works for further study or acquisition
  • Obtain access to publications
  • Produce lists of references

Expectations also include:

  • Access to electronic resources (taking into account rights, authentication and authorisation etc.)
  • Location information for traditional publications
  • Display or export of bibliographic records in appropriate formats

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

End user requirements for display of results or citations are similar to those of reference librarians wishing to identify specific publications i.e. data displayed should include:

  • Complete records
  • All elements needed to identify, select and enable to obtain access to publications (See IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, 1998)

Search requirements (for online national bibliographies):

Search requirements are similar to those of reference librarians or book trade users and therefore require similar access points e.g.:

  • Author name
  • Ttle words
  • Language/country of publication
  • Publisher
  • Publication year
  • Subject headings or keywords
  • Publication type/genre/format
  • Standard identifiers (e.g. ISBN, ISSN, ISMN)