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

Citation

Nisonger, T.E. (2002), "Making Sense of Standards and Technologies for Serials Management: A Guide to Practice and Future Developments for Librarians, Publishers, and Systems Developers", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 2, pp. 245-247. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.2.245.11

As noted by MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) four functions must be performed before an end user has access to a journal article: “discover, locate, request, and deliver”. Serials standards are important because they could allow a seamless interface among these functions as well as among different hardware, software and systems. Rosemary Russell states in the introductory chapter that this book examines and evaluates serials standards and makes recommendations for their further development. Some of the standards discussed here, such as MARC, apply to more than serials, but their sections pertinent to serials are focused upon.

Chapter 2 by David Martin and Mark Bide is devoted to descriptive standards for serials metadata. The Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI), Publisher Item Identifier (PII), Digital Object Identifier (DOI), ISSN, MARC and the Dublin Core are among the reviewed standards. Current practice in describing serials at the article, issue and title level is examined, based on findings from a questionnaire sent to about 30 organisations, such as publishers, subscription agents and document suppliers, and 60 individuals involved with serials. The authors then make seven specific recommendations, e.g. that the UK Higher Education Funding Councils, Electronic Libraries Programme should adopt SICI as a unique identifier for serial articles. There are lengthy appendices to this chapter, presenting data about the survey methodology and the handling of serials data by the surveyed organisations.

The next chapter, also by Martin and Bide and incorporating findings from their survey, covers standards for Terms of Availability (ToA) metadata, focusing on three “families of standards” – MARC, Electronic Data Interchange and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). The authors examine the use of these standards in book sales, print and electronic serials subscriptions, document delivery, inter‐library loan and electronic resources both internal and external to an organisation. Standards for serials holdings data, primarily in library catalogues but also in serials check‐in systems and secondary indexing services, are addressed in Chapter 4 by Alan Hopkinson. Following detailed examination of SICI and MARC as the two major options, Hopkinson concludes that the two are “exclusive alternatives” because “it would be awkward … to work with both”. The final chapter deals with standards for document requesting. Following an introduction by Rosemary Russell, the chapter is organised into separately authored parts providing detailed examination of four standards:

1. 1.

   (1) the ISO ILL protocol by Ruth Moulton;

2. 2.

   (2) Z39.50 by Denis Lynch;

3. 3.

   (3) EDIFACT by David Martin; and

4. 4.

   (4) HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) by Tracy Gardner.

A few organisational difficulties should be noted. Chapter 1 is really the introduction and the volume has no conclusion. There is no bibliography and the references at the end of each chapter cite only a fraction of the published literature on serials standards. The book would benefit by a “list of abbreviations” to help sort out the alphabet soup of standards and organisations referred to by abbreviation.

Perceptive insights are frequently offered. For instance, Martin and Bide observe (p. 66) that the transaction terms are “well understood” when a book is purchased but not when an electronic resource is licensed. This volume is well written. The authors have authoritative credentials. Descriptive and prescriptive approaches are successfully combined. The numerous standards that impact serials are examined in detail and successfully explained to the reader, often with illustrations. One is tempted to state facetiously this will be the “standard book” on serials standards, but such an assertion would be highly doubtful owing to the rapid evolution in this area. Nevertheless, this volume nicely complements The Serials Management Handbook, (Kidd and Rees‐Jones, 2000).