Concepts

Serials Management adds, edits, deletes, and displays data related to serials, journals, periodicals, and any other materials that are published more than once with some relationship between the issues. Serials Management (hereafter, "Serials") functions are integrated with the other major functions: Cataloging, Circulation, Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), and Reports. Therefore, changes in Serials are reflected throughout the system.

Since Serials are integrated with Cataloging, each Serial title needs a MARC bibliographic record (hereafter, "bib"). This bib may be as brief as a title (MARC bib 245 $a). To indicate that a title in the catalog participates in Serials Management, the title's MARC bib must have a tag 949 subfield a value of SERIAL (MARC bib 949 $a SERIAL). This key alerts Serials Management to allow the creation of Serial Copies, which allows the checking in of issues.

The Serials database may be built by hand, primed by an NLM SERHOLD Holdings Report, imported from OCLC Serials Holdings, or built by a combination of these three methods.

Serials Management has the following basic elements:

       MARC Bib 
           | 
      Serial Title Copy (at least one, can be many) 
           | 
   Serial Issues (holdings)