The OPAC Reborn

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's too bad these e-journals aren't 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 don't 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 doesn't know it can access electronically.

How many journals are available electronically, versus in print, in libraries today? With the database holdings information available at Serials Solutions, we undertook a study at 210 academic libraries of all sizes and types and 25 large public libraries. We determined how many unique titles they can access electronically and compared that with the number of print journals they hold, based on the larger of data either from the 1998 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) or 2002 American Library Directory.

At associate-granting institutions, 86.5 percent of the journals they provide access to are available electronically. Among baccalaureate institutions, 83.3 percent of their journals are available electronically, and at master's institutions, it's 71.3 percent. For doctoral institutions, the number is 39.5 percent, and for public libraries, the number is 64.3 percent. Doctoral institutions are most likely to have much larger print collections than other libraries. They will often have older titles, or titles in microform, which other libraries will not hold. For more on this study, see the December 2003 issue of Libri.

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 doesn't include abbreviated titles, translated titles, variant titles, publication information, history, previous or subsequent titles, or most information that a complete MARC record holds.

Looking to the future, this isn't just about serials. Libraries need MARC records for e-books, useful web sites, even for concepts. Gale Group's MARC records for authors in its literary biographies series are an excellent tool for students who seek information about those authors. A new catalog should manage access to all the traditional resources, but it should also include access to items not well described by the MARC format.

Librarians have found ways to cram laptops, for instance, into a MARC record, so a user can check one out from the academic library or toys, tools, or museum passes from the public library. They have found ways to catalog e-resources, from books to journals to reliable web sites. But they have only done it to a limited degree.

Roy Tennant has pointed out that our current system focuses on cataloging the physical object (see "MARC Exit Strategies ," LJ 11/15/02, p. 27). The future of an "any time, any place" library, however, is centered on electronic resources. This requires electronic management of, and access to, those resources. If librarians want their OPACs to remain the central source of information about their collections—in all formats—they need to expand ways to include all sorts of nonphysical items. An excellent starting point? Electronic journals.