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Dragonfly, Spring 2001 SERHOLD and the Public's Access to Health Information: An Update

Susan Barnes
Resource Sharing Coordinator

In July 2000, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association published an editorial entitled "SERHOLD and the Public's Access to Health Information" (vol. 88, no. 3, page 269). In this editorial, Nancy Press presented the need for wider availability of health serials holdings information to better support health information for the public. She outlined several steps that could be taken to make it easier for non-health libraries to get copies of health articles for their patrons, including developing the capability to load SERHOLD data into OCLC's WorldCat database. In her conclusion, she encouraged health libraries to "lobby OCLC to load SERHOLD data." Here in the Pacific Northwest, an ad-hoc group of librarians from various constituencies - health, academic, state library - did just that, by submitting a proposal to the Resource Sharing Subcommittee of the OCLC Users Group in the fall of 2000. This proposal, developed in consultation with NLM and endorsed by the Health Sciences OCLC Users Group, suggested that many types of OCLC members would benefit from its developing the technology to accept serial holdings records for batch loading into WorldCat. The proposal identified SERHOLD as a good set of holdings data with which to begin.

What has happened since then? Nancy's editorial and the ad-hoc group's proposal apparently arrived on OCLC's doorstep at the right time, just as an internal OCLC task force recommended that:

OCLC should develop a viable, scaleable service to provide automated batch record processing to update OCLC Union List holdings for OCLC Union List participants and Union List Group Access participants. The service must accept serials holdings information from a participant's local automated system or other sources in a standard format and process it to update the library's OCLC union list holdings. (Full report is at http://www.oclc.org/oclc/union/taskforce.htm)

Shortly afterward, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Washington, DC, OCLC and NLM announced that they would be working together on a way to transfer holdings from SERHOLD into WorldCat. This was great news! Since then, OCLC has determined which pieces of information from SERHOLD will comprise which parts of OCLC's LDR ("local data record" -- the format used for holdings by OCLC). With NLM's assistance, OCLC is now working on matching the correct bibliographic record in SERHOLD to the right one in WorldCat, so that holdings are attached to the right title. Once that has been achieved (and that is a rather knotty issue since not all SERHOLD records have OCLC numbers), a pilot project will begin in which a few test libraries' holdings will be transferred. The libraries that have agreed to participate in this pilot project from our region are: Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Intercollegiate Center for Nursing Education, Linfield Portland campus, and both Tuality libraries (the hospital and consumer library).

Thanks to these libraries for their participation in the pilot project, and, of course, to NLM and OCLC for embarking upon it!

URL: http://nnlm.gov/pnr/news/200104/serhold.html