Best practices for displaying a journal collection?

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Best practices for displaying a journal collection?

1nonob
Bewerkt: dec 4, 2020, 2:58 pm

My club library has a multiple year subscription to a journal. I'm trying to come up with the best way to display it in the TinyCat catalog. Are there best practices or examples of how other libraries have done this?

Also is there an option to list the TOC of a journal that would display in the record?

2Opteryx
Bewerkt: dec 4, 2020, 3:42 pm

If you manually add each issue to your catalog separately, you can put its Table of Contents in your Comments field. Then if you turn on display of the Local Notes on your TinyCat pages, it will show your Comments there. https://www.librarything.com/topic/289286 I'd also paste the ToC into the Member Description so other people on LibraryThing can benefit from it, but I don't think that field can be displayed on TinyCat.

I recommend entering the issue titles without using colons, so that they won't be auto-combined by LibraryThing's algorithm that assumes anything after a colon is unimportant for distinguishing uniqueness. Use dashes and/or commas instead. For example, "Awesome History Journal - Vol 06, Issue 03". You can also add the month/year in parentheses after that if you like, since although things in parentheses get ignored too, the volume and issue numbers are enough to make it unique already. Including the leading zeros on volume/issue numbers makes them sort in order by title better.

3nonob
dec 4, 2020, 3:49 pm

Thanks Opteryx, this is very helpful.

4nonob
dec 4, 2020, 3:59 pm

Thank you VERY much. This is likely a question for a LibraryThing group but since it is all related I hope it's OK to ask here. Since this journal is fairly obscure (it doesn't even show up in the LoC) and there are many issues is there a way to create a master record and then copy and edit it so I don't have to type in the information 60+ times? I could copy it, edit the issue number, ToC info, publication date etc.

5Opteryx
Bewerkt: dec 4, 2020, 5:04 pm

>4 nonob: You won't get any help from the Library of Congress or public library records for adding individual issues regardless, since the vast majority of such libraries just make a single basic record for the journal as a whole that says they have "1998-2007" or "v6-v18" or similar. You do not want to create individual issues on LT by editing a generic public-library multi-issue record like that, since it leaves them all grouped together as duplicates of the same work.

And if you're curious why LoC has such a hard time keeping up with journals... in addition to generally not wanting to pay for subscriptions, LoC is no longer allowed to receive normal USPS mail without it going through a damaging amount of irradiation (makes paper/glue brittle), so the publishers have to pay for Fedex/UPS to ship to LoC safely. (Theoretically LoC claims to be capable of providing prepaid labels, but they were completely incapable of actually producing one after I hounded them for months on behalf of a small nonprofit organization that publishes a journal.)

There's no way to "create a master record and copy and edit it" within LT, but what you can do is what I did for adding a bunch of journal issues myself - make a simple spreadsheet that carefully follows LibraryThing's misnamed "Universal Import" format. Title (as previously described), primary author (make these all the same, the name of the organization that publishes the journal; if you want to take the time later, you can later manually add the individual issues' editors/authors as Other Authors), publication year, tags, and a few other things can be entered this way. Leave the ISBN column blank, not that there would be ISBNs on journal issues anyway.

After they've all been imported, you can go through and paste in the ToCs and add covers and such. I'd also recommend making a Series on LT to list them all once you're done. And do a "Power Edit" in your LibraryThing catalog to get all the journal issues set to the "Book > Paper Book > Journal" media format.

6nonob
dec 4, 2020, 7:21 pm

Once again, thank you. You have been SO helpful. I'm a retired librarian but I never worked in tech services so this is kind of fun for me to figure out. :)

7Opteryx
dec 4, 2020, 8:52 pm

>6 nonob: Glad to help. :)

8H.C.P.
apr 30, 2021, 11:19 pm

This whole discussion has been so helpful. We're a small library, new to TinyCat, trying to figure out how to make our journals more accessible.

Question: When you say...

"After they've all been imported, you can go through and paste in the ToCs"

How do you copy the ToCs? We have paper journals going back years. The Universal Import sounds good, but we would need searchable ToCs to make it worthwhile.

Thanks!