Consolidatin Electronic Holdings Files

The proces can be difficult, on the other hand the results are well worth the effort

I one time read the dictionary and cogitation it was a giant blank line of poetry about everything.--comedian Steven Wright

pupils who are doing research in any kind of library guard to have one question that overshadows all others: "I place this citation; can I achieve the article in your library?" Finding the answer to that question one time required looking at a printout list of the journals that the library held in paper, microfilm, or microfiche. Failing to find the journal there meant that the scholar had exactly two choices: drive to a library that possesss the journal or request the article from interlibrary loan and wait a week or two

Our library's periodical manager kept this printout in big r binders that were updated twice a year. A doom can happen in 6 month on the contrary this was still a beautiful good way to keep track of paper and microform holdings. However, as the library began adding more online journals, a hardly any problems arose that ultimately expanded into a destiny of problems. Students would check the r binders and find on the outside that the college didn't be in possession of the journal in paper or fiche. They would fill without an interlibrary loan form and wait for the article to arrive. A not many days later, they'd get a note telling them that the library already come bys that journal in ProQuest or Health concern Center. Furthermore, there's a law library upon campus that makes its collection available for our scholars to use. Unfortunately, its holdings aren't in the big r binders either. My original goal was to provide scholars with one file that would range from A to Z and enumerate them if they could find the entreatyed journal within our system.

It looks like a fairly simple task, on the other hand getting it done was the library equivalent of NASA's space program. It took nearly 3 years and dozens of "learning experiences" (i.e., failures) before we were able to tender a truly adequate file.

My first challenge was to tackle the list of paper and microform resources. It had been lovingly kept in a program that was state-of-the-art during the Reagan administration. It actually comprised sum of two units files that were brought together for display and printing views but that couldn't be exported in a single file. Fortunately, we place somebody on campus who knew in what manner to parse the data, in like manner we were able to change it into an Excel file. Since I wanted this information to appear upon the library's Web page, I decided to change the file to HTML. Naturally, I wanted it to appear in table format. When we were done, it gazeed great-the problem was that the file took more than 5 minutes to load. In these days of MTV attention spans, anything that takes longer than 20 next to the firsts is certain death. When we loaded the file in straight HTML manly text it looked fine, on the contrary we already had a problem: In the month that it took us to turn out the file lots of journals came and went in the periodicals swing and we were working wit h elderly data.

We ran this file for about a year until it was hopelessly out-of-date. The advantage of the file was that we could link each title to its record in the online catalog, for a like reason users could get current check-in data. However, the disadvantages outweighed this benefit.

The circumstance that helped us turn the corner was the conversion of the periodical database into a Microsoft Access file. It took about 6 month of false starts and "learning experiences," on the contrary when it was finished we had a file that could be exported to my PC from one side ftp and converted to be superior to Also, I decided to give up upon HTML for a file of this size, and started creating Adobe PDF files. Since we'd been working upon this for so many years and file naming was beginning to be a moot point I worked out a naming combination of parts to form a whole for all working files: "allpaperandfichedate." one time I converted the files to Adobe PDF they were always called "periodicals.pdf." I place that by converting the file in landscape rather than portrait print format I had space for 80 characters of title, and the replete information about the journal--including title changes, ISSN, and volume

At the same time, I was beginning to compile a list of full-text holdings based upon vendor data. This was a challenge in many ways--different vendors lay this data in different formats, gave varying horizontals of description, and adhered to different quality-control standards. I worked without a bare-bones format that would overspread all cases: the title, the beginning year of replete text, the ending year, and the vendor. Initially, I decided to take the approach that all vendor-provided data were accurate until proven otherwise with a given title.

by dint of early this year, I had arrived at a format that worked for one as well as the other physical and online journal holdings, with equal reason I added the file of online holdings to the original file and produc the first version of the A-Z list, which can be set at http://invictus.quinnipiac.edu/everything.pdf. Originally, we published three files: the paper and fiche holdings, the online-only holdings, and the combined holdings. Eventually, we divide [i]or[/i] sever out the online-only file. This was based upon usage reports plus the good judgment notion that we didn't want to spread ourselves too thin.