Word of the Week

WOW: Serials

Yes, the word might make you think of Corn Flakes or Lucky Charms, but the serials we get here at Cook Memorial Public Library District aren’t that crunchy (though some are that sweet).

Simply defined, “serials” is a general term describing repeating publications such as magazines, newspapers, and journals. Other familiar terms used to refer to them are “periodicals” or “continuing resources.” Annual travel books such as Fodor’s are examples of serials, too.

Our new Millennium ILS has a very powerful Serials application and some slick ways of handling the many new issues we receive on a daily basis. Since we don’t subscribe to the Journal of Cereal Science, maybe it’s easier to think about the weekly People magazine. The Millennium Serials application is used to add the new issues about Brad & Angie, Britney, etc. to the catalog when they arrive each week. It also lets us know if an issue is late or a copy is missing, and it reminds us when our People subscription is about to expire.

A cataloger creates a single catalog record (using that MARC coding we talked about last week) to handle all of the People magazines that the library might get. Each copy of each issue is a Millennium item associated with that record. If we get five copies of People magazine this week, we add five items to the catalog. The cataloger is involved in a major way only when a subscription is new; the Periodicals department does the work each time we receive an issue.

Hopefully, Millennium will make it easier to handle the workload of dealing with our many serials. After things get settled down, you might want to see if Virginia has time to give you a quick tour of Millennium’s “Serials in action” – snap, crackle, pop!

Thanks to Barb Jarvis for starting our day out right while explaining 'serials' to us.