---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 09:23:20 -0500
From: "Horn, Marguerite" <HORNMA@SYSADM.SUNY.EDU>
Subject: Re: 510 Field (2 messages)

Steve (and others):

Years ago when I was at Brown University, we had a policy of keeping only
those 510s which applied to our library, acknowledging that the information
was useful, but looooong.  Particularly in the days of producing cards, this
was a major concern.

As I migrated to other places, the policy frequently in place was to delete
them all.  I didn't really argue about this, since it is not particularly
"cataloging" information ... and no one was keeping the information
up-to-date.

I didn't argue UNTIL I was in a library where the Reference staff were
producing printed guides indicating which titles indexed in Reader's Guide,
Social Science Lit., etc. were available at the library.  At that point, we
had also migrated to a system where report generation was extremely easy.  I
realized that if we had retained the 510s we could have automatically
generated, on-demand, an up-to-date list for Reference, including holdings,
etc.

The larger the library, the larger the serials collection, the harder it
would be to keep this information current.  But usually the larger the
library, the fewer specialized services (like mentioned in the above
paragraph) are offered.

My two cents.

Maggie

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Marguerite E. "Maggie" Horn
Library Systems Implementation Specialist (and long-time serials cataloger)
Office of Library & Information Services
System Administration
State University Plaza
Albany, NY 12246
voice: 518 443-5564
fax: 518 443-5358
e-mail: hornma@sysadm.suny.edu

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