Lori,

  We don't at this time have an "authorities unit" authority
notification service.  We do usually get a notice from check-in staff
when corporate bodies associated with the main entry or title change
(or change their names).  It's more difficult to get information
about other associated corporate bodies that may change.

  When we do have a systematic, vendor-supplied authority notification
service sometime in the coming months, I believe that we will work on
conditions for making these kinds of updates.  As you point out, in
order to attach a new name to a record, a cataloger should verify that
the corporate body is still associated with the serial during the time the
new name is in force.  We probably won't find this easy.  I foresee
difficulty in giving exact-issue detail for when each change began, but
it may be possible to give general information with an incomplete date
or a "date by which."  I question whether more is necessary in a local
catalog; searching will succeed just as well!

If this verification could be done from local records without excessive
expenditure of time and search charges, we have long considered adding
the new entry worthwhile.  (Of course, we are also concerned about
titles, subjects, ISSN's and other items of information that also
change or get added, and that also could make searching more successful
if attached to a catalog record.)

Frieda Rosenberg
Serials Cataloging
CB #3914 Davis Library
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, N.C.  27599
friedat@email.unc.edu
--------

On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Lori Osmus wrote:

> (paragraph deleted)
> I am wondering to what extent other libraries update serials
> cataloging records when corporate body names have changed.  About
> half the serials catalogers here think that what we are doing is too
> time consuming on an ongoing basis, and we should update the
> corporate body names only when a serial needs other recataloging.
> The other half feel strongly that library users need
> up-to-date corporate body names for their searching, and that
> even though there will be cross-references between earlier and
> later forms of names, users will probably not follow up on
> them to find a serial under an early form of a name that has
> changed frequently.
>
> Due to a glitch in the Authorities Unit procedures, the serials
> catalogers have not been notified of corporate body name changes for
> the past year, and so far there have been no complaints from other
> library staff or users.  Iowa State University has over 50,000
> serials cataloging records in its NOTIS-based online catalog.
>
> How do other libraries discover that corporate body names have
> changed on serials, and when and how much recataloging do you do
> to handle this?   ....