SPECTRUM - A WEB-BASED TOOL FOR DESCRIBING ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Substantial efforts to establish standards for encoding and accessing electronic resources have occurred over the past five years. We have d esigned a Web-based tool, called Spectrum, to enable individuals witho ut specialized knowledge of library cataloging or markup to create rec ords for describing and accessing networked electronic resources of va rious types. System users may create descriptions of electronic resour ces and view them as formatted USMARC bibliographic records, TEI heade rs and URCs. Because we anticipate continued volatility in the definit ion of data element standards, the Spectrum system is designed to allo w maximum flexibility in the design of the input formats.