Taking into account the swift growth of electronic resources and very modest opportunities of cataloguers, the most appropriate way out seems to be the creators of electronic resources should themselves participate in forming metadata on their resources, similar to the existing practice of preliminary cataloguing of printed products. The task is rather complicated, and some of our colleagues even think it to be a utopia. In Russia, the central body that is responsible for registration of electronic resources, for the sake of providing copyright protection is Informregister. In the present, people, who work at Informregister and are responsible for managing the database on electronic resources, are facing all the above-mentioned problems. Based on the experience of the RSL in cataloguing Internet resources and on the availability of the necessary software, we are planning to create the system of preliminary registration of electronic resources by their creators.
Any author can access our server and fill out the fields of the proposed form.
After he or she enters his data, the creator gets the registration number and the description of the resource in the standard format. Then the author should file his application form to the Informregister, where he indicates the RSL registration number, which was provided for the resource. The number would enable the Informregister staff to find the description of the resource in the RSL meta-database, to correct and to add other fields to the existing description. We have reached understanding with Informregister, which will be transformed into a formal agreement on cooperation in the experiment on creation of the meta-database on electronic resources. We will have to arrange a number of organizational issues to be able to fulfil this plan.