SUNCAT Blog

SUNCAT is the Serials Union CATalogue for the UK research community.

SUNCAT is a free EDINA service enabling researchers, librarians and others to locate serials held in libraries throughout the UK. The catalogue contains information on both print and electronic serials, including journals, periodicals, newspapers, newsletters, magazines, annual reports and other publications of a continuing nature.

SUNCAT currently contains serials' information from over 70 UK research libraries, including the British Library and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. New libraries continue to be added to the catalogue on a regular basis.

Thursday, 28 February 2008

Web 2.0 day out

The SUNCAT team had a day away from updating libraries last week and travelled all the way across the road to the National Library of Scotland. The event was a seminar organised by the Cataloguing & Indexing Group in Scotland with a title which obviously appealed to the whole team:
“Toto, I’ve got the feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”: metadata issues and Web 2.0 services.

The day included presentations on



  • Cataloguers using Web 2.0 tools for collective and collaborative working

  • Semantic web or Web 3.0

  • Wikipedia

  • Tagging (including some of the pitfalls and attempts to develop tagging guidelines)

  • Scottish Screen Archive on YouTube

  • National Library of Scotland on Flickr and Facebook

  • Scottish Library and Information Council encouraging communication and participation among the Scottish library and information community using a range of tools, including Del.icio.us, SlideShare and a Scottish Libraries Web 2.0 area on Pageflakes

All in all it was a very informative day for the team. It was stimulating to hear what others are doing and we left hoping to be able to add more Web 2.0 functionality to SUNCAT. In addition to this blog we currently use a wiki for collaborative team working and have created a SUNCAT search application for Facebook (see post on Feb 18) but we’d like to do much more…

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