Cataloging Non-Print Materials: Challenges and Techniques for Accurate Bibliographic Records

Walk into any modern library and you will find far more than rows of printed books. There are audiobooks on CDs, documentary films on DVDs, microfilm reels, digital archives, streaming media, and born-digital files that exist only on servers. Each of these resources needs a catalogue record so that users can find it. But describing a documentary film or a music recording is not the same as describing a textbook. The page count, the publisher’s imprint, the spine label, none of these familiar anchors apply in the same way. This is the core challenge of cataloging non-print materials, and it demands a specialised approach to bibliographic description.

What defines non-print materials 🔗

Non-print materials are information resources that are not conventional printed text on paper. They carry content through sound, moving images, still images, or digital files, and they usually require a device, such as a player, projector, or computer, to access the content. This single difference, the need for equipment to use the resource, sets them apart from books and shapes nearly every cataloging decision that follows.

Audio resources 🔗

This category includes sound recordings on physical carriers such as audio CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records, as well as digital audio files. A cataloguer describing an audio resource must capture details that have no equivalent in a book: the playing time, the number of sound channels (mono or stereo), and the recording technique. MARC field 344 was created specifically to record these sound characteristics, which simply do not exist for printed matter.

Video and moving image resources 🔗

Films, documentaries, and recorded performances arrive on DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and increasingly as digital video files. These are among the most complex resources to describe because they combine sound, image, and often text, and they involve many contributors. A single film record may need a cast note (MARC 511), a credits note (508), a summary (520), and a technical note (538) describing the disc format. Best practice guidance recommends recording details such as the playing time, the language of the soundtrack, and specific carrier formats that the standard controlled term lists may not cover, like DVD-R or DVD-RW.

Digital and electronic resources 🔗

Digital resources include e-books, datasets, web pages, software, and streaming media. Some of these are reformatted from a physical original, while others are born digital, meaning they were created in electronic form and never existed physically. Digital objects can be a digital image, a manuscript, digital audio, a three-dimensional artefact, or digital video, and each presents its own description problems. Unlike a book, a digital file has no fixed physical extent you can measure with a ruler. Its identity rests on file format, encoding, and access conditions instead.

Key elements in cataloging non-print materials 🔗

Cataloging any resource means creating a surrogate record, a structured description that stands in for the item itself so users can search, identify, and locate it. For non-print materials, certain elements carry far more weight than they would for a book, and a few elements are unique to these formats.

The shift from GMD to content, media, and carrier types 🔗

Older cataloging practice under the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules used a General Material Designation, or GMD, a simple tag like “[sound recording]” placed right after the title to alert users to the format. The current standard, Resource Description and Access (RDA), replaced this single tag with three separate and more precise elements: content type, media type, and carrier type. In MARC records these appear as fields 336, 337, and 338. The change matters because one broad label could no longer capture the variety of modern resources. A film and an audiobook might both once have carried a GMD, but they differ sharply in content, the device needed to play them, and their physical carrier. The three-part system makes these distinctions explicit and machine-readable.

Physical description 🔗

The physical description, recorded in MARC field 300, captures the extent, dimensions, and other physical details of the resource. For a book this means pages and height. For non-print materials it means something quite different. Field 300 must record physical characteristics such as playing speed, the kind of sound present, the number of channels, and the motion picture presentation format. For a DVD, the dimension recorded is the diameter of the disc in centimetres, rounded up to the next whole centimetre. This is a clear example of how the same field adapts its content entirely depending on the format being described.

Notes and supplementary fields 🔗

Because non-print resources cannot always reveal their requirements at a glance, notes fields do heavy lifting. A technical note explains what equipment is needed to play the item. A system requirements note for software lists the operating environment. RDA records also use a dedicated playing time field (306) in addition to the physical description, so that machines can process duration data reliably. These supplementary fields ensure a user knows, before borrowing, whether they have the means to actually use the resource.

Metadata for digital resources 🔗

For digital materials, libraries often look beyond MARC to metadata schemas designed for the web. The best known is Dublin Core, a set of fifteen core elements such as title, creator, subject, date, and publisher, created to describe resources across many domains. Dublin Core emerged in 1995 from a workshop sponsored by OCLC and became an international standard in 2003. Its great strength is simplicity, which makes it easy to apply and to share between systems. Its weakness is that it lacks the depth required for highly structured or complex materials, which is why richer schemas exist alongside it.

Different kinds of metadata serve different purposes. Descriptive metadata, like Dublin Core or MODS, helps users find and understand a resource. Administrative metadata supports management and long-term stewardship, including technical details and rights information; PREMIS is a leading example. Structural metadata, such as METS, describes how digital files relate to one another, for example the order of pages in a digitised book. A well-managed digital collection usually combines all three.

Technological barriers and solutions 🔗

The practical difficulties of cataloging non-print materials are as much about technology as about description rules. The challenges are real, but so are the tools developed to address them.

The problem of format obsolescence 🔗

Physical carriers age and the equipment to play them disappears. A library may hold a perfectly preserved videocassette but have no working player. Digital files face an even faster version of this problem, as file formats and software become unreadable within years. The cataloguing response is to record technical details meticulously, including format, encoding, and system requirements, so that the institution retains the information needed for future migration. Digital preservation metadata standards like PREMIS exist precisely to hold this management and preservation information.

Source of information challenges 🔗

With a book, the title page is the authoritative source for description. Non-print materials have no title page. Information must be taken from the resource itself, such as a film’s title screen, or from accompanying material. Cataloging rules handle this carefully: for video recordings, the physical description, notes, and standard numbers may be taken from any source, but other details should come from the credits or accompanying textual material. Information drawn from a container or box that is not formal accompanying material must be enclosed in square brackets to signal its lesser authority. These conventions tell future users exactly how reliable each piece of the record is.

Standards and tools that provide solutions 🔗

The library community has built a layered set of standards to manage this complexity. RDA provides a flexible, principles-based framework designed for the digital world, one that accommodates analog and digital resources alike and is extensible to new types of material as they emerge. RDA is built on the conceptual models FRBR and FRAD, developed by IFLA, which give a structured way to think about resources, their expressions, and their physical manifestations.

MARC 21 remains the dominant encoding format for sharing bibliographic records, and it was deliberately designed as a carrier for many material types, including computer files, maps, music, and visual materials, not only printed text. Crucially, RDA is compatible with a range of encoding schemas including MARC, MODS, and Dublin Core, which lets libraries move data between systems. Specialised best-practice guides, such as those produced by the Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC) for DVD and Blu-ray discs, fill in the detailed decisions that the general standards leave open. In the Indian context, INFLIBNET supports this work by hosting educational resources on metadata and Dublin Core for library professionals and students.

Controlled vocabularies and consistency 🔗

To keep records consistent and searchable, cataloguers rely on controlled vocabularies, agreed lists of approved terms. The content, media, and carrier type fields each draw from such lists, pairing a human-readable English term with a coded symbol so that both people and machines can interpret the record. For visual materials, cataloguers are encouraged to use standard terminology from resources such as the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials. This discipline prevents one cataloguer recording “film” while another records “motion picture” for the same kind of resource, which would fracture search results and frustrate users.

What do you think? As streaming services and born-digital content steadily replace physical media, do you think traditional MARC-based cataloging will continue to adapt, or will simpler web-oriented metadata like Dublin Core eventually take its place? And how should libraries balance the cost of detailed technical description against the constant risk of format obsolescence?

References

1. https://web.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/RDAvideo-cataloging-guidelines.html
2. https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=147853&p=6778333
3. https://sustainableheritagenetwork.org/system/files/atoms/file/CDPDublinCoreBPs_0.pdf
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_and_Access
5. https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd300.html
6. https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/usageguide/
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp3/chapter/metadata-and-dublin-core/