I guess I am still not clear. We want any patron who is looking for a
newspaper title to be able to see something which tells that person what we
have and what condition it is in. Sort of a digital card catalogue! Online
and available for the web catalogue. Serials check in (Voyager) just doesn't
really work for what we want to do as we'd have to add dummy purchase orders
and all that. Summary holdings do not work for us, as our newspaper
collection is HEAVILY used by researchers and we get so many calls asking us
to check out holdings that we thought we'd like to be able to display
detailed item level holdings for each of the thousands of pre-1900 (and
mostly pre-1876) newspapers and serials which we have.
Also serials check in doesn't really give us latitude to make some of the
types of reports we want to make in the formats in which we want to make
them. Yes, we could write a report and "claim" missing issues, but it seems
to be very cumbersome and awkward. We are looking for something which will
work with Voyager as that is our in-house system of choice.
(Am I getting more clear?)
Again, thanks to all who have answered, it is really helpful and useful.

S.J. Wolfe
Senior Cataloguer and Serials Specialist
American Antiquarian Society
Mailto:swolfe@mwa.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~perseshen

-----Original Message-----
From: redhead [mailto:redhead@ksu.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 8:27 AM
To: SWolfe@MWA.ORG
Subject: Display of item holdings

After reading your question, I am not sure I understand what you are wanting

to do.  Are you not wanting  to use patterns to display the single items?  I

can understand that you might not want to create an item record for ever
issue.

We use Voyager also and for most things use patterns for check-in. We
undisplay the issues when they are bound or removed from the reading room.
We
only create items when we bind volumes.

Does this help?  Let me know if I can help in some way.

Mary Bailey
redhead@ksu.edu
Serials Manager
Kansas State University Libraries
Manhattan, KS 66506