The SUNCAT team recently held a teleconference with Janifer Gatenby and John MacColl from OCLC to discuss collaborating on a project to enhance discovery to delivery. OCLC have recently loaded 30 million articles into WorldCat and discussions led to the idea for a scoping study, using a sample of around 30,000 electronic serials. The aim of the study is to investigate joining up discovery to delivery including article level information and connecting to the wider content of a serial, including articles in the same issue or to related articles in other issues of the same serial. This will involve consideration of the creation of an electronic serials registry which would have the potential to be usable as a CLOCKSS and serials registry and/or as an authority file for the serials.
The group are also interested in investigating work related to FRBR and the clustering of material at work level. As a union catalogue, SUNCAT has experience of matching serials at work level, while WorldCat has done work on identifying work clusters. Collaboration would benefit both services, assisting the process of distinguishing different expressions of a work and their related metadata, clustering these at work level and hence reducing duplication.
A background paper is currently being prepared by OCLC and this will inform the next meeting to be held in March.
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
SUNCAT and WorldCat collaboration
Friday, 11 January 2008
Pilot MARC record download service
Last month we released a pilot downloading facility for SUNCAT Contributing Libraries. The pilot service enables our Contributing Libraries to download a subset of SUNCAT records in MARC format via Z39.50. The records are from CONSER, the Library of Congress Cooperative Online Serials programme.
There are over one million CONSER records available and these are of very high bibliographic quality and are particularly strong in their coverage of current Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) titles. The records are free of charge to SUNCAT Contributing Libraries, enabling them to download records for newly purchased serials or to upgrade their existing serials records.
We are currently unable to offer the entire SUNCAT database of records in MARC format due to IPR restrictions imposed by a commercial supplier on records supplied to our Contributing Libraries. However, the SUNCAT team are investigating methods of filtering out these records so that we can offer a greater proportion of the SUNCAT database for download.
Details of how to set up and configure the Z39.50 connection are available at http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/z-target-auth.shtml
Please contact the EDINA helpdesk with any comments or queries about the pilot service.
