Roel Tilly <R.Tilly@UB.UNIMAAS.NL> wrote:

>I was very interested in reading your mail on the URL minder.  As we are
>currently looking into the procedures for handling E-journals I would like
>to know if you have attacked the problem of keeping track of the
>continuity of journals.
>
>For example at present we get each issue through the mail and record it
>into our systems. If a journal is not running for any reason at all we get
>a notification from the system in the form of a claim and we react upon
>this claim. However if we subscribe to E-journal we don't know when issues
>are dispached to the library and if we've received them.  I was talking
>with some people by Elsevier but the only answer they gave me was to go
>through the dispached issues list that they publish regularly. In further
>discussing this we agreed that this was not the way to go with E-journals.
>I don't know if you looked into this problem or have a solution for it.
> Please let me know if you have more information on it, or would like to look
>into this problem with us.

If you are subscribing to issues of a serial that are sent directly to you
via ftp or e-mail or any other method, and if you are archiving them
locally, then the idea of an issue "arriving" is still valid, as is the
idea of "holdings." However, if you are paying a fee to have access to a
web site put up by the publisher, there is no such thing as an issue
"arriving" for your library. If it has been published, that is, put up on
the site by the publisher, you should be able to access it. A grey area
here could be if you are paying for access to only a portion of run of a
serial instead of to the entire thing. But even in this case, I would argue
that you do not have holdings in the traditional sense of the word, and
should simply include a note in the bibliographic record specifying what
you are paying for.

Our systems of checking in serials and keeping holdings are based on a
physical inventory system. We have to keep up with these individual
physical pieces because we need to know if each piece arrives, and we need
to let our patrons know which subset of a journal (out of the entire set
of all the issues that have been published) we own at our institution. In
the case of electronic journals this physical inventory aspect has been
lost, but we are still accustomed to seeing detailed "holdings" in records
and feel that we need to replicate this practice for electronic journals
in order to exercise control over them.

The answer to the questions "which issues have been published?"  and
"which issues does my institution provide access to?" can now be answered
directly by the patron by navigating directly to the resource itself. We
no longer have to provide this information in our records in order to save
the patron the step of walking around in the stacks and tracking down
which issues we own or which ones are presently on the shelf, or if the
latest one has arrived in the mail yet. I hope that we don't start a kind
of virtual check in that will replicate the check in process too closely.
We clearly have not dealt with the archiving question in any satisfactory
way, but virtual holdings that reside on someone else's server are, in my
opinion, not appropriate candidates for our physical inventory databases.

Is anyone out there doing check in of e-journals? Can you offer another
view, and an explanation of how this works for you? I would love to see
more discussion of this topic.

***********************************
Pamela Simpson
Serials and Electronic Resources Cataloging Librarian
E506 Pattee Library
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA  16802-1805
(814) 865-1755  Fax: (814) 863-7293

p2s@psulias.psu.edu
***********************************