SUNCAT and WorldCat collaboration

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.