---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 16:18:54 -0700
From: Naomi Lloyd <lloyd@TECHBC.CA>
Subject: Re: Summary of responses to journals in aggregator sets,
                  etc. (Ev erett Allgood)

Hi All,

One of the challenges of procuring these records is keeping them up to
date. The journal coverage tends to change fairly regularly and
maintaining correct holdings information could be a challenge.  A
colleague suggested that with EBSCOhost journals a solution might be to
download the records every couple of months (deleting the records for the
previous download). This would preclude the time-consuming task of
manually checking the list of journals covered.

This colleague felt that this approach would not be possible with ProQuest
databases as one paid a fee every time one downloaded the records.  I
spoke to a sales rep. at ProQuest at a recent conference and he said that
this was not the case.  That one could download the records any number of
times after an initial fee.  I'm not sure that he really understood the
problem, though.

Naomi
_____________________________

Naomi Lloyd
Information Resources Specialist
The Portal
Technical University of British Columbia
2620 Surrey Place Mall
King George Highway
Surrey, BC V3T 2W1
Ph: (604) 586-6018
Fax: (604) 586-6025
http://portal.techbc.ca

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:02:52 -0400
From: Everett Allgood <everett.allgood@NYU.EDU>
Subject: Summary of responses to journals in aggregator sets, etc.

Colleagues :

I don't want to get your hopes up too much with the Subject Line in this
message. When I posted my original query to Serialst regarding available
bibliographic record sets for Aggregator Databases, I received a number of
responses. Alas, by far the majority of them were interested in what I
learned, so I thought I would send a summary reponse to the list.

Obviously, this seems to be a topic of great interest to serialists. In
fact, for those attending ALA in San Francisco this June, there is a
tentative proposal that this will be a discussion topic at the Monday
afternoon ALCTS Committee to Study Serials Cataloging meeting. Stay tuned
for details, and watch for a posting of the final CSSC agenda.

As for the substantive responses, I spoke with John Riemer, the Chair of
the "PCC Task Group on Journals in Aggregator Databases." He pointed me to
a list of bibliographic records for aggregator sets available at the OCLC
WorldCat web site:

http://www.stats.oclc.org/cgi-bin/db2www/wcs/wcs_cols.d2w/Electronic

I also spoke with the CONSER Coordinator, Jean Hirons. She was
particularly interested in the idea of institutions forming cooperative
arrangements to catalog the titles within these large aggregator sets.

One respondent said he had indeed formed a cooperative cataloging project
with another institution on one or two of the aggregator sets. However,
this was not established on an "official" level. Rather one in which both
catalogers knew their institutions were receiving the same set, and so
decided to collaborate in their cataloging.

The rest of my responses (between 15-20) were from those interested in
what I learned.

I hope this is helpful.

Everett Allgood
Serials Cataloger
New York University Libraries
everett.allgood@nyu.edu
212 998 2488