A ìunion list of serialsî may sound like a quaint library tool for finding information about serial publications, including magazines, journals, newspapers, annuals, and series, and library holdings. In the era of the World Wide Web, when bibliographic information is so easy to obtain, who would support one? Brown University Library does support the Union List of Serials put out by members of the Consortium of Rhode Island Academic and Research Libraries (CRIARL) for very good reasons.

The goal of this union list is to provide in one compilation, with details about exact local holdings not found in larger databases, the serial resources of academic and research libraries in the state. The list recently has grown with the addition of fifteen medical libraries, members of the Association of Rhode Island Health Sciences Libraries (ARIHSL).

The concept dates back to the last century, when bibliographic and holdings information about serials was difficult to obtain, especially for geographically separate library collections. The original union lists bear all the birthmarks of the era of card catalogs: careful editing, case-by-case annotations, and being, sometimes, years out-of-date. Some libraries did not formally catalog serials in their card catalogs, so that such a list of serials, shared with other libraries, became, de facto, a local list as well.

With the rise of computer applications in libraries, union lists began to change. The CRIARL Union List of Serials was originally created manually in the early 1980's. It was soon supplemented by subscription information held by the Faxon Corporation, a serials subscription agent.

The Faxon database, however, was proprietary and non-standard. It reflected Faxonís interests, indicating, for example, whether a library received a foreign serial via express mail or surface mail. It was non-standard because Faxon used a unique database structure which it never shared with other library computer systems. When the Faxon Corporation restructured and changed its focus in the early 1990's, it went out of the union list business.

This left CRIARL with reels of tape in a non-standard data format and little else. After much anguish, wrestling with database standards, and a grant from the Champlin Foundation, the Consortium ìmigratedî the List to an Innovative Interfaces, Inc. platform, from the same company which maintains Josiah software and that of ten other CRIARL libraries. The tapes were loaded and emerged in May, 1996, as an option on the Brown library gateway menu on Josiah (telnet version) under the category for selected catalogs and databases.

The quality of the new, or more accurately recycled, List, however, left much to be desired. The holdings information was at that point nearly two years out-of-date, since Faxon had ceased to update it in 1994. The bibliographic records were all in capital letters and contained numerous misspellings, strange spacings, and extraneous information. To correct these bibliographic howlers, the Union List editors immediately commenced both to rid the List of duplicate records and to replace as much bibliographic information as possible with standardized records. By September, 1997, over 20,000 records had been replaced.

CRIARL staff in the various institutions also quickly began to update holdings information and add those of Johnson & Wales University and Roger Williams University Law Library, new CRIARL members. The latter library has recently added its holdings through an electronic transfer and updating program, a cutting-edge application which avoids the expense of keying new information twice, once in the local library system, and again in the List.

Very soon the List will be available on the Web. Until that occurs, the only access is through the "traditional" telnet version of Josiah, available on workstations in the Reference areas and on the list of Electronic Resources on the Library homepage. Choosing "GATEWAY to Other Catalogs and Databases" from the main menu provides access to a list of choices including the CRIARL Union List.

Has all this work been worthwhile, however, when the serials holdings of CRIARL member libraries are so easily accessible in national databases already? The answer to this lies in the reality that library computing is not equally available everywhere. Some CRIARL member libraries have few or no computing facilities, but do have rich collections of certain materials, e.g., the Rhode Island Historical Society, or have significant serials collections listed on computer systems not readily searchable by outsiders, e.g., RISD, a situation which will soon change. The Union List, as a ìcontrolledî information environment, allows the searcher to consult state-wide research and academic serials holdings simultaneously with few keystrokes, little duplication, and real-time network response. Another kind of bibliographic searching will soon allow searchers to assemble ìvirtualî world-wide union lists, but faces some of the same difficulties: network response time, duplicative results, and inaccessible computing systems. Though its methods are traditional and scope is more limited, the CRIARL Union List of Serials offers searchers timely, accurate, and concise information now and for the foreseeable future.

--Gavin Ferriby

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