The Library of Congress Cataloging Directorate is pleased to issue "Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan." The Action Plan stems from the Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium: Confronting the Challenge of Networked Resources and the Web, held on November 15-17, 2000. The Cataloging Directorate convened this invitational Conference as a working meeting of experts from the various communities that play a role in the creation, retrieval, and cataloging of Web resources. The primary goals of the Conference were: 1) to develop an overall strategy to address the challenges of improved access to Web resources through library catalogs and applications of metadata; and 2) to identify attainable actions for achieving the overall strategy. The aim of the conference, therefore, was to generate recommendations for the Library of Congress, in collaboration with the larger library community, to use as a blueprint for action to improve bibliographic control of the Web.

The Cataloging Directorate is grateful to the 135 Conference participants for their insights and expertise. Their deliberations resulted in eleven sets of recommendations that have been distilled into this Action Plan. In developing the Plan, we took into account both the original Conference goals and LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress, the National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by the Library.

From the content of the recommendations, we teased out some over-arching objectives for the framework of the Plan. This resulted in the identification of the following six objectives into which the action items were placed: 1 increased availability of standard records for Web resources; 2 enhanced record display and access across multiple systems; 3 collaboration among metadata standards communities for better bibliographic control of Web resources; 4 development of automated tools for harvesting and maintaining metadata; 5 provision of appropriate training for the Web environment; and 6 support of research and development to enhance bibliographic control of Web resources.

We are keen on enlisting the support and involvement of varied organizations and groups in taking concrete actions to implement our plan. For each action item, we identified LC organizations, as well as potential external collaborators, to help with implementation. Some organizations will assume lead roles; others will serve in contributing roles. Additionally, we may secure experts to serve as principal investigators. We also assigned a priority. The priorities have two aspects that were assigned as follows: near-term could be accomplished within eighteen months; long-term could be accomplished within five years. The aspect of "High," "Medium," or "Low" was assigned on the basis of the benefit each action would bring to the library community relative to the expense involved in carrying it out.

Many recommendations underscored a theme of the Conference, namely, the importance of collaboration, partnerships, and synergistic approaches to providing better bibliographic control to networked resources. Every objective of the Plan acknowledges the importance of partnerships between libraries and a broad spectrum of other groups: metadata producers; standards developers; systems and software vendors; computing and technology suppliers; scholarly and academic enclaves; publishers; dot.com creators; bibliographic utilities; registration agencies; other information providers; government agencies; other libraries, including national libraries; and other stewards of cultural and historical knowledge, e.g., museums and archives.

It was clear throughout the Conference and in follow-up discussions that many of the recommendations would pertain not just to resources available on the World Wide Web, but to digital content available in other venues and even to certain non-digital materials as well. Nevertheless, we have retained the phrase "Web Resources" in the title of the Action Plan as a tie to the title of the Conference. Although a few of the action items in the Plan may not appear to be central to the original goals of the Conference, Conference participants proposed them with such enthusiasm that we felt persuaded to include them in the Plan.

Library of Congress
December 20, 2001
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