Emerging trends from the halfway point of the eBook survey can be found on the eBooks Project page (Survey progress, under the Programme heading).
The Team is now looking at specific needs of sectors of the Library and these will be incorporated into guidelines for the SOP (see Minutes). Please let us have any suggestions, either by email or post comments to Counterculture.
Deirdre
I think there are discussions that could be had at a number of levels on this topic, not necessarily limited to the confines of our institution. The term "e-book" means different things to do different people. (Bit like the "when is a database a database" discussion we had (still have?) a few years ago). Perspectives may include but are not limited to, an e-book package the Library subscribes to, e-books available on the web e.g. Google books, a website (in the broadest sense), a pdf document on a website, or an object on an institutional repository. I have had general New Zealand recommendations for cataloguing things in the last case (from both library staff and library users). While it doesn’t make sense to duplicate metadata on different systems, the examples submitted are things users might understandably expect to find on our library catalogue, particularly if we’re already cataloguing electronic resources of various descriptions and particularly if we hold the print copy of something (e.g. discussion papers) that are on an IR somewhere in NZ.
We do have existing distinctions (for example we don’t catalogue journal articles on the Library Catalogue – even though some users would assume we do) but it raises lots of interesting questions about the possible need for more clarity on the different categories of information that sit in different resources locally and nationally, how different "databases" and repositories of information link together in meaningful and consistent ways for users, and what we can do by way of our information literacy programmes, federated search tools or meta-search engines for library catalogues, digital libraries, IRs and so on to try and make some sense of it all. Tim S