Background on Content Contributors to the New Melvyl Catalog

A key feature of the new Melvyl Catalog is the merging of the two different databases that have been available in the Melvyl Catalog system, CAT and PE. CAT represents the non-serials holdings for all of the University of California campus libraries. PE represents what has been referred to as the California Periodicals Database, which includes not only the serials holdings for all of the UC campus libraries, but also records from the California Union List of Periodicals (CULP) and the California Academic Library List of Serials (CALLS). However, as is evident from the content comparison chart, not all contributors to PE are included in the new Melvyl Catalog.

During the implementation process of the new Melvyl Catalog, numerous policy issues were reviewed by the UC systemwide group, the Systemwide Operations and Policy Advisory Group (SOPAG). A key issue was the content of the Union Catalog.

At a time when fiscal resources are ever tighter, the purposes of the Melvyl Catalog were reviewed, and a reexamination of the content of the catalog was undertaken, including a review of the non-UC contributors to the legacy Melvyl Catalog system. A key principle endorsed was that there be inclusion of both monograph and serial records from a source, now that a merged database covers all formats. If a user finds a serial record from an institution, the expectation is that all records are available for that source. The separation of CAT and PE minimized that kind of confusion. In the new Melvyl Catalog, all sources contribute both monograph and serial records.

CULP and SERHOLD were included in the legacy Melvyl Catalog because of financial support from the Library of California. In 2002, the Library of California announced that it would no longer fund CULP or the inclusion of SERHOLD in the Melvyl Catalog. CULP will no longer be produced. In addition, a survey was undertaken of UC staff to determine the importance of each of the non-UC sources to the UC community, the primary stakeholders for the union catalog. The survey indicated that CULP and SERHOLD were used primarily to make referrals in the community. In addition, librarians at the medical center libraries accessed SERHOLD directly, through the National Library of Medicine.

An important consideration in selecting contributors to the Melvyl Catalog is the financial commitment on the part of CDL to include sources in the catalog beyond the prescribed UC library sources. Writing the conversion programs to load records from a system is a significant expense, as is the continued overhead of loading the records and dealing with inevitable changes in record input formats. As such, the non-UC contributors to the PE database were particularly scrutinized. At the time that some of the non-UC serials' contributors records started being loaded into PE, the institutions did not have their own online catalogs. Some of the sources were unable to provide regular updates to PE, so that PE's holdings were not current for all existing contributors.

SOPAG not only endorsed the principle that all sources should contribute both monographs and serials, but also that the CDL should provide easy links to search the non-UC sources that are no longer in PE. The short term solution was to provide links to the institutions' catalogs, so that users could get up-to-date information on their holdings of any kind. A longer term solution is being explored to provide a "broadcast search" feature so that a user can search across selected catalogs. See the other catalogs link in the top right hand bar of every new Melvyl page.