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| Format: | Recurso educativo Open Access |
| Language: | en |
| Published: |
2004
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ705139 |
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Table of Contents:
- The OPAC Reborn: Electronic Content Belongs in the OPAC, at Least if We Want People to Find It McCracken, Peter Microforms Librarians Libraries Electronic Journals Internet Library Services Electronic Libraries Databases One critical role of the catalog is to help librarians manage and track their inventory, whether it's books, videos, journals, microfilm reels, laptops, or even access to study rooms. The phrase, "if you can't track it, you don't own it," is quite real for the library that is trying to monitor thousands or millions of items. In the last decade, libraries have completed retrospective conversion projects, bringing metadata about all their monographs into one place--good news for librarians and users alike. But relatively few libraries track some of the newest, and most popular, resources they provide: the electronic journals available through database aggregators and online publishers. Patrons love these resources, accessible any place, any time. It is too bad these e-journals are not in the catalog, but it is understandable. After all, libraries generally lease, rather than own, the content. Also, the content changes constantly. The bibliographic information is sometimes minimal, at best, and access points can change without notice. To top it off, a library would need to track information about literally tens of thousands of different journals. We sympathize with the librarian who may not be able to capture this information, but what about the customers who lose out if they do not know that a journal is available in a specific database? How many patrons go away empty-handed, when the library is actually already paying for access to the journal? Money--and the patron's time--is regularly wasted in interlibrary loan requests for journals the library does not know it can access electronically. It's clear that the majority of the journals a library provides access to are available electronically, rather than in print. This is a significant and impressive change in how patrons can access data, and it happened in only a few years. But without the MARC records in the catalog, the library is doing its clients a serious disservice. As more and more titles are offered only electronically, and libraries continue to cancel print subscriptions, electronic holdings will increase in importance. An A?Z list of these journals only goes so far. It does not include abbreviated titles, translated titles, variant titles, publication information, history, previous or subsequent titles, or most information that a complete MARC record holds.