Bibliographic control in the Nordic countries

Abstract

The Nordic countries all carry out endeavours to achieve bibliographic control. This paper gives the status of legal deposit legislation and national bibliographies, with a specific focus on remote electronic resources. The use of international standards in the Nordic library community is described as well as specific projects or cooperation areas.
In the Nordic countries there are some major shared library systems such as Gegnir (Iceland), LIBRIS (Sweden) and DanBib (Denmark). Shared systems have made cataloguing more efficient and have created awareness on the need for standardization and cooperative effort. The data from companies such as the Norwegian Library Bureau or Bibliotekstjänst have also played a role in the standardization in bibliographic data. Another example of cooperation and standardization is the Faroe Islands where the National Library is responsible for purchasing and cataloguing books for most of the public and school libraries. The trend is to catalogue from scratch as little as possible and reuse what others have already created.
In terms of retrospective conversion many major libraries e.g. university libraries, major public libraries and the national libraries have been converting their card catalogues into machine-readable form. Even though some of the conversion programmes are really impressive (e.g. the conversion of the national bibliography of Finland) there is still work to be done…
Almost all library catalogues in the Nordic countries appear on the Internet. There is a trend to link catalogues together on the web to form regional catalogues. The Danish union catalogue DanBib is available for all citizens for searching and obtaining material. Sweden has created a similar service. Even the union catalogues have been linked in a project called SVUC (Scandinavian Virtual Union Catalogue).
In this paper I have sought to give an overview of bibliographic control in the Nordic countries. The countries, though similar in many ways, also have clear differences, and it is not easy (or recommendable) to generalize too much. As always some aspects could have been added to shed more light on Nordic cooperation and bibliographic control.