Serials Solutions modifications? -- do it yourself!

[Kenneth R. Irwin]

Hi all,

I don't know to what extent Serials Solutions is likely to modify their 
product to link to individual titles, but this is certainly something that 
you can do on the local level. At our library, we do our whole serials list 
locally, with no third party intervention; that gives us full control over 
the linking capability.

It can be a little tricky to go it on your own, but if you someone who's 
Perl and SQL skills are adequate, it should be quite manageable. You want 
Perl to take the vendor's title lists out of their native form and squeeze 
the data into the right shape for your local database; you'll want the SQL 
& interfacing script language (I use PHP; you could use Perl there too) to 
handle the user side. We're quite happy with the end result, which we've 
been using in one form or another since 1998.

You can see the current implementation at:
http://www6.wittenberg.edu/lib/research/ejournals/
(although the URL just says "ejournals", it actually has our print and 
microfilm holdings as well)

(The UNC Greensboro library has a similar and probably more extensive 
project at:
http://journalfinder.uncg.edu/uncg/ )

Be not afraid -- do it yourself! (I expect that it would be possible to 
take the SS list and run some Perlish modifications, but at that point, you 
might as well save yourself a few thousand bucks on SS and just do the 
whole thing yourself.)

Caveats:
1. The startup time on this is not negligible; a personweek or two, with an 
incremental hour or two for each new vendor you want to include (since you 
need to write individual data-loaders).
2. Libraries that don't have the in-house scripting skills will be happier 
just using the plain SS product. Unless, of course, you've always wanted an 
excuse to learn Perl... ;)

If anyone wants to tackle something like this, I'll be happy to help out, 
though I'll probably be more useful to folks who are inclined toward 
Unix/Linux development.

Joy and independence,
Ken



Ken Irwin                                               kirwin at wittenberg.edu
Reference/Electronic Resources Librarian        (937) 327-7594
Thomas Library, Wittenberg University