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Aggregator databases Cheryl L. Conway 15 Sep 1999 15:15 UTC

I am forwarding this topic for my department head.  You can respond
directly to Jennifer at jkolmes@comp.uark.edu.  Thanks in advance for your
assistance.

"My subject is what they're calling "aggregator databases."  You know, like
EBSCO's Academic Search Elite,  Bell and Howell's ProQuest Direct, and
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.  Essentially, they are services offering
access to full-text versions of varying runs of serial titles.  The PCC
Standing Committee on Automation's Task Force on Journals in Aggregator
Databases was working on an EBSCO demonstration project a few months
ago--has anyone heard anything about that lately?  As I recall, they were
leaning toward recommending that holdings for individual titles in these
aggregators be made commercially available for loading into ILSs, as
opposed to libraries trying to keep this kind of information current and
local on their own.

Anyway, my question is:  Are there any brave (or foolhardy, as the point of
view dictates) souls out there attempting to integrate holdings data from
these behemoths MANUALLY into their catalog records?  By "manually," I do
not mean to exclude anyone who may be utitlizing macros or other automated
shortcuts; I mean by simply entering the data record-by-record and
attempting to keep the data up to date in a similar fashion."