Dealing with AV media and digital files in the Swedish Media Database at the National Library of Sweden

The Audio-visual Department within the National Library of Sweden receives a constant stream of material under the Legal Deposit Act – phonograms, videos, interactive multimedia products, radio and TV. The holdings are approximately 8 million hours of recordings.
In dealing with this we depend on the Swedish Media Database (SMDB), our in-house cataloguing system, containing over 1.6 million catalogue records. We use the IASA Cataloguing Rules – translated and adapted – and Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) in a simplified form. Content and carrier records are created in the cataloguing. Carrier records describing different manifestations of published material (e.g. editions, different formats, kits, boxed sets) are then linked to content records. This enables us to group together several manifestations of the same work/expression.
SMDB is a large system, containing more than 3 million hours of digitised material, instantly accessible for our in-house users via the web interface.
Programme schedules from nationwide broadcasts are imported and converted into the SMDB via the metadata funnel. Swedish Public Radio/TV and the commercial channel TV4 also deliver the actual programs as files, which are linked to the catalogue records automatically.
The on-going digitisation, with a capacity of 2800 hours of recordings per day, gives us further copies to deal with. Such a collection of a selection of digital files on the web – while waiting for the new Legal Deposit Act, which will include web publications – raises new questions about how to record metadata, both with regard to descriptive and technical metadata.