Nancy Birkrem's reply to my posting, in which I expressed my joy that CONSER
is considering allowing nonparticipants to do some maintenance (e.g. close out
earlier record when a title changes, adding 780/785, etc.), sparked another
issue in my mind. I wholeheartedly prefer   362 0  -v. 1, no. 7 (Apr. 1994)
over 362 1 Ceased with ...  I got to thinking about how there have been
problems in OPAC displays of this and other special serial fields.

On AUTOCAT, about every six months there is a good polemical discussion of
how OPACS eliminate descriptive elements of the record and then create a
new description by using labels followed by access points (e.g. Contributing
author: Payne, A. F. G. (Alice Faye Grant)  ). Also, the 362 is not an
access point, but the handling of it varies according to the OPAC's ability
to handle indicators, with some bizarre results. The public may get quite
confused if the there are two 362 fields, one formatted and one free text.

Another OPAC difficulty is the formatting of titles. I have seen cases where
the OPAC uses the label "Related titles:" and then puts all the 246's, the
730's, and the 780 and other linking fields together in one note.

Anyone care to share experiences? I don't recall seeing a discussion of this
on SERIALST (of course I may be wrong, let's say I'm throwing it out for
discussion today, if anyone is interested).

Rick Gildemeister
Cataloger/OCLC Enhance Coordinator
Lehman College of the City University of New York
EEGLC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU