05SUNCAT Launch

SUNCAT Launch 15.02.05

I began my career as a periodicals librarian and somehow I seem never to have quite escaped. I began my career as one of those young Turks arguing for the death of BUCOP – the British Union Catalogue of Periodicals. Well we achieved that 25 years ago and I at least then find a certain irony in no chairing the committee reinventing a national union catalogue.

The major reason for doing this is in response to user demand, as Ronald has outlined.

But in responding to that user demand and in looking at the road ahead I want to make it clear that what we are celebrating is the first step in a national union catalogue not just a catalogue of higher education libraries in general or CURL libraries in particular. Although it is the JISC which has yet again put its trust in the library community with a seven figure sum, even to get this far we have relied absolutely on the support of the national libraries, both in shifting resource to support this and in making clear their public support for this initiative.

Let’s just take a moment however to remind ourselves of the JISC mission: “JISC provides ICT infrastructure and development programmes to support education and research. It is uniquely placed to promote the joining up of activities to help achieve its vision. JISC can help to bring cohesion across the education spectrum – colleges, universities and wider non-compulsory education – so that practitioners and students will be able to access materials from different sectors of education, thus promoting a broader understanding of subjects. By helping institutions integrate their research, learning and teaching and administration processes, technology can be used to improve efficiency and quality. JISC is working with the eScience, eLearning and digital library communities to develop generic online information management and an underlying infrastructure which will enable the effective sharing and use of information resources, regardless of data type. These form the key strategic aims for JISC.

So the aim is to link communities: communities of practice; disciplinary communities and communities within institutions from undergraduates to Nobel prizewinners.

Phase one has consisted of a handful of major HE libraries and phase 2 will do the same, but we now want to engage with other communities: with RCUK; with learned societies; with MLAC; with the regional consortia; with major public libraries to explore how far and how fast we can make this a truly union catalogue which will benefit the national community of scholarship and not only the academic community.

We have deliberately avoided monographs. Both focus groups with researchers and meetings with the broad library, records and publishing community showed little appetite for such a venture. Bibliographic control and availability of monographs in the UK is by and large not an issue. Bibliographic control of monographs is good and a combination of COPAC – also an adventure funded by JISC – and national library catalogues covers all but the most esoteric of needs. The 80/20 rule clearly applies here and such a catalogue might please cataloguers but would cost as much as the Dome – but would attract fewer visitors.

Contrariwise, serials records are a mess – a problem identified by Lorcan Dempsey and UKOLN years ago. So the Union Catalogue is not just the bringing together and de-duplication of records in a massive database, already totalling almost four million records, it is a once in a generation or perhaps a lifetime opportunity to upgrade our serials records to a level and a quality not yet seen in the UK.

Serials are also undergoing a period of rapid change as they move to an electronic environment. Open Access journals bring the challenge of cataloguing what we don’t have rather than what we do have; the nature of the journal itself is being changed; print and electronic do not always map exactly; pre-print archives and institutional repositories offer new models of scholarly communication. The area is rich with questions and research opportunities. The UK has led in the digital library world and we are grateful to the JISC for again funding research, experimentation and standards work by the community. SUNCAT will include electronic journals as well as paper ones and the challenges will be demanding. Fortunately in EDINA we have a team who are well equipped for this role.

But the first and most important challenge is to see whether we can translate SUNCAT from the dream of a national union catalogue into the reality. And always remember that the people who will benefit from that are not those inside this room, but those outside it.