Spectrum: A Web-Based Tool for Describing Electronic Resources

Abstract Substantial efforts to establish standards for encoding and accessing electronic resources have occurred over the past five years. We have designed a Web-based tool, called Spectrum, to enable individuals without specialized knowledge of library cataloging or markup to create records for describing and accessing networked electronic resources of various types. System users may create descriptions of electronic resources and view them as formatted USMARC bibliographic records, TEI headers and URCs. Because we anticipate continued volatility in the definition of data element standards, the Spectrum system is designed to allow maximum flexibility in the design of the input formats.