Something a little different to think about…

In my last post, I briefly mentioned the Interactive Fiction Identifier (IFID) as an e-lit equivalent of an ISBN (although some e-lit games use the latter). In this post, I want to take a closer look at the IFID and how it’s used within the Interactive Fiction (IF) community.

This week, I’ve been thinking about how MARC records deal with non-book formats. It’s important for a library catalog user to be able to see what kind of resource they’re looking at before they actually search for it in the stacks: any given title could be for a book, an audiobook, a CD, a DVD, some microfiche, an atlas… (maybe not any given title…) Regardless, MARC records have three fields to describe an item’s content, media, and carrier (fields 336, 337, and 338, respectively). Books are described as containing text (“336 $a text $2 rdacontent”), requiring no special equipment to use (“337 $a unmediated $2 rdamedia”), and having a book-like physical structure (“338 $a volume $2 rdacarrier”). Each field uses controlled vocabulary from an official RDA list, which is cited in the $2 subfield, making it possible to use other Thesauri to describe materials if there are better vocabulary choices.

I can see why Controlled Vocabularies are so popular…

At the Woman E-Lit event this past Tuesday, Kathi Inman Berens described e-lit as “Literature that you can mess with, and that messes with you.” This feels like an apt starting point for attempting to categorize a variety of born-digital media that often eludes definition. Works of e-lit can be poetry, prose, images, audio/visual media, games and things defying a name.