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Re: Series Use CL WOLFSON, please. 04 Mar 1994 16:50 UTC

This is a comment on a message Steve Savage posted to the List on
Feb. 23, concerning The following comments are based on several perspectives.

The following comments come from 2 perspectives.
1) 19 years as Head of Acquisitions in our Health Sciences Library.
2) 4 years "volunteering" on the Reference Desk, anywhere from 2 to
   8 hours per week.

My experience is that users and library workers searching for series
titles approach this 2 different ways, depending on the information
from which they are working.

Many patrons have lists of printed citations, either from Medline,
or from many other similar bibliographic citation databases.  These
cite series titles in the same way as they do any standard journal.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences is cited the same way as
New England Journal of Medicine.

However, publishers' ads and book reviews cite series as only one
piece of information about book titles.  So a particular volume of
the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences is cited with that
volume's individual title and author(s) or editor(s), and the series
title and number will be in very small print buried in the midst of
other information.

When ordering books, this is usually the information available to
Acquisitions workers, who must determine if a given title is part of
focussed on cataloging concerns, so standing order, before placing
an individual order for the book.

I must admit being less familiar with the LC Series Report than I
should be.  I remember some discussion on SERIALST, but as it seemed
focussed on cataloging concerns, I did not pay much attention.

If the thinking is to restrict access points, I plead that as
many as possible be retained.  As pointed out above, there are at
least two consituencies with different needs in terms of type of
information offered, and access points, with regard to series.
There may be other needs as well.

Thank you.                  --Cathy Wolfson