Making Sense of Standards and Technologies for Serials Management: A Guide to Practice and Future Developments for Librarians, Publishers and Systems Developers

Citation

Woodward, H. (2001), "Making Sense of Standards and Technologies for Serials Management: A Guide to Practice and Future Developments for Librarians, Publishers and Systems Developers", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 44-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2001.29.1.44.2

This book is essentially a distillation of the important work undertaken by UKOLN in the MODELS workshops (Moving to Distributed Environments for Library Services). The MODELS programme identified four “MODELS verbs” which provided a focus for discussion and development: discover, locate, request, and deliver. These verbs also provide the framework for this book. The individual chapters, authored by well‐known experts in their fields, cover: descriptive standards for serials management; standards for terms of availability metadata; standards for serials holdings; and standards for document delivery.

The international body of serials literature is highly complex and a range of tools and services has developed to identify and locate information within it (for example, abstracting and indexing services, publisher and aggregator services and document delivery services). Increasingly in the electronic environment there is a need to provide links between these separate services to make them easier to use in order to make best use of resources and to speed up and enhance the search process. The individual chapters therefore examine the standards and technologies which enable interoperability and encourage the development of integrated systems.

Three chapters focus on the standards relating to metadata (variously defined as “information about information” or “content which describes content”) and accompanying issues. David Martin and Mark Bide describe the range of “Descriptive standards for serials metadata” including International Standard Serials Numbers (ISSNs), Serial Item and Contribution Identifiers (SICIs), and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Title, issue and article level metadata are covered and the chapter concludes with a useful summary of the metadata elements which are required for a properly structured identification of serials articles in a form which will support automatic generation and matching of SICI codes. Martin and Bide also contribute Chapter 3 to the book – “Standards for Terms of Availability (ToA) metadata”. Although the ramifications of ToA metadata go well beyond the confines of serials, the advent of e‐journals has certainly raised awareness of the issue. The authors define ToA as “data accessible to customers or users which include any or all of: financial terms of sale; copyright and other conditions of use; and terms for interlibrary loan, photocopy supply or downloading in electronic form”. They also acknowledge that standards for ToA data are much less well developed than those for metadata. Serials related transactions discussed in this chapter include ToA for: print and electronic journal subscriptions; document delivery; interlibrary loan; and internal and external electronic resources.

The third metadata chapter by Alan Hopkinson covers “Standards for serial holdings and for serials data in the serials analytical record”. This is a detailed and fairly technical discussion of the way in which standards might be developed to better match a user’s search for a particular journal article and the library (or libraries) holdings. The ideal would be to provide an exact match which will identify the record of the required item in a collection and examine it to see the current availability of the item. Hopkinson begins by examining existing metadata (used in, for example, abstracting and indexing services, library catalogues and serial check‐in systems). There then follows a detailed round‐up of available standards such as SICI, MARC and ISO 10324 and recommendations for further work on these standards.

Chapter 5 – which comprises five parts – is a lengthy and rather unbalanced bringing together of standards for document requesting. It addresses the plethora of standards to be applied to the wide range of possibilities and complexities involved in document requesting, ranging from traditional interlibrary loan to document delivery services and freely available Web documents. Part 1 is a useful overview of the topic. Part 2 is a substantial contribution from Ruth Moulton on the ISO ILL protocol including a useful description of a range of national and international projects utilising the protocol. Z39.50 gets a very brief coverage (five pages) in Part 3 of the chapter, as does document requesting with http (barely two pages). In Part 5, David Martin returns with an examination of “EDIFACT – International Standard for EDI”. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is already a widely recognised standard for trading in the commercial book and journal markets and Martin provides a general description of the EDIFACT format with a number of specific examples showing how it is used in book trade and library applications. He concludes that there seems no reason to doubt that EDIFACT messaging for book and journal acquisitions will be the norm in the next generation of academic and public library management systems.

In summary, this book is a very useful compilation which describes how the UKOLN MODELS programme has drawn together a series of building‐blocks for the development of standards for the serials industry for all its players – whether they be librarians, publishers or aggregators. While few people will read it from cover to cover, the contributions provide some embryonic keys for unlocking the wealth of serials information and literature held in our library collections.