Serial aggregations, multiple versions, and the virtual union catalog: The California digital library catalog, Suny, and ex libris experiences

Abstract

Librarians have long agonized over the challenge of the so-called multiple version problem: how to catalog, associate, and present related titles or related manifestations of a given work. The appearance of increasingly large aggregations of electronic serials that defy easy control has raised the level of interest in newer approaches. At the LC Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control, Confronting the Challenge of Networked Resources and the Web, I argued that vendor supply of metadata for serial aggregations was essential if the library community was to achieve title-level control of these important and expensive titles. It was argued that keeping MARC records for the aggregations separate in the technical services view of the catalog but merging them on the fly for the public view of the catalog would allow a sophisticated ILS to achieve the best of both worlds by having individual records and supporting a multiple versions approach to the public display. Since that talk was delivered in November 2000, the California Digital Library and the State University of New York's Office of Library Information Services have worked with Ex Libris to implement a multiple versions approach to their virtual union catalogs.