We used to be an SFX customer and had our print serial holdings loaded there. Yes, it was painful. All those titles without ISSNs? Well you can try to match them by title in SFX. I ended up doing a lot of hand-searching
every time around. I also ended up loading a lot of local titles into SFX.
Now we have Gold Rush (Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries consortium) and it’s still painful. Any link resolver you have is going to be a lot of work. But the patrons and library staff like seeing the print
holdings right there with the electronic journals so what are ya gonna do.
One thing that made it less painful is cleaning up records and adding holding notes for serials which didn’t have them previously. Also I have learned how to wrangle Excel 2007 (Sort, Concatenate, Find/Replace,
Conditional Formatting for duplicates, dealing with the long SFX IDs) and I’ve learned a bit of programming in Python. This helps me clean up ISSNs and titles for matching purposes, and to set up the holdings notes prior to loading them into the link resolver
KB.
If anyone wants help with Python, I’m happy to share my messy newbie code. Python is easy to go out and download. I’m using version 2.6. The most useful thing to know is, in the Python command shell:
Copy and paste a row from Notepad into a docstring, which is defined with triple quotes
mydata = “””
[paste]
“””
Then the code:
for row in mydata.split(“\n”): # takes each row as defined by the split “\n” or carriage return/enter
# process the data with string & slice operations
print row # from here the procedure repeats until no more rows are found
And voila, Python spits out a list of prettied-up data you can copy and paste back into Notepad and from there into Excel. I got this simple trick from our Systems & Metadata librarian, Jeremy Nelson. Once you
get used to doing these little programs in Python, you can really save a lot of time. You can devise code to strip out proxies from URLs or add them back in, pull the garbage out of ISSNs, remove articles from titles, all kinds of stuff. I haven’t gotten
to the point where I can process multi-column csv files in a Django framework but maybe someday …
Hope this helps,
Diane Westerfield, Electronic Resources & Serials Librarian
Tutt Library, Colorado College
diane.westerfield@coloradocollege.edu
(719) 389-6661
(719) 389-6082 (fax)
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu]
On Behalf Of Platkowski, Melissa
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 7:58 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] FW: including print holdings in journal A-Z list
We include our print holdings. We attempt to update the list every 6 months or so (although we do tweak by title as things are weeded).
Our link resolver is SFX, and loading print titles into it… well, I’d call it a “pain in the neck” for politeness’s sake, but that phrase does not do it justice. Part
of the problem is that the best chance for reliable title matching is the ISSN. Not all of our print titles have an ISSN, since we have a reasonably large collection of underground newspapers. Some of these don’t even have an OCLC number.
I am working on some way to get these titles with no ISSN to match on something else, like the object ID number in SFX, but I’ll have to figure out how to get SFX to
look for that, and find a place in the catalog record to store it where SFX can find it.
Melissa Platkowski
Electronic Resources Librarian
David A. Cofrin Library
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Dr.
Green Bay, WI 54311-7001
P: (920) 465-2764
F: (920) 465-2136
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu]
On Behalf Of Kathleen Dougherty
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 8:03 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] including print holdings in journal A-Z list
Thanks very much to everyone who responded to my previous question about tracking usage of current serial issues. The responses were so helpful I thought I’d throw another question out to the list
J
We have EBSCO A-Z, which currently lists online titles only. I was wondering if many libraries include print holdings in their A-Z lists, and if so, how often they update them?
Thanks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kate Dougherty
Electronic Resources & Government Documents Librarian
Leonard S. Washington Memorial Library
Southern University at New Orleans
6400 Press Drive
New Orleans, LA 70126
504-286-5222