We recently completed a project to put our periodicals holdings in our
online catalog. I work at a private business school library in Japan as a
monographs cataloger so I wasn't directly involved with the project. I noticed
today for the first time that the cataloging module (We are using DOBIS
with a lot of local modifications) showed a periodical title when I was doing
a call number search. I, at first, thought this was some sort of error so I
contacted one of the Japanese staff for an explanation. Our public catalog is
searchable in English or Japanese and our records cannot display everything
in a record (We display the following: authors, titles, publisher, 1st note,
isbn/issn, holdings, date/vol (362), and copy (Call number)).

Our periodicals are arranged by title so the staff came up with a solution
to notify our users online where a title was shelved (later titles are
shelved with earlier titles, regardless of alphabetic order of the title
change). They put this information in the Call number field since we don't
have them classified and this field displays in the public catalog. I take
exception to this (I think it should be noted in the HOLDINGS field) but my
Japanese colleague didn't budge. My question is: are there any of you left
who still haven't classified your periodicals/journal collection. How have
you noted shelving/location information for title changes? They are loathe
to shift the titles in question. Which field in an OPAC should be used for
this purpose?

 Is their solution for using the call number field innovative and clever,
or are there problems associated with it? (I personally object on aesthetic,
rules based and (in my mind) more accurate/logical grounds). My personal
feelings aside, does anyone see anything wrong with their approach? AACR2 and
international standards have not been fully recognized here, nor are any
in the Serials/Periodicals section educated or trained as librarians. Their
approach has been consensus based and pragmatic as far as possible.

Please respond directly to me. If people on the list are interested, I will
gladly supply a summary of responses. Thanks!

Debra Wynn
Foreign Section Librarian
Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration
DWYNN@JPNNUCBA bitnet