Proquest holdings problems

[Stacy Pober]

I wanted to try to have our list of journals integrated into the
holdings feature for ProQuest, UMI/Bell & Howell's periodical indexing
database. The ProQuest files do include some full text, but a large
number of titles are index/abstract only.  Since we get a large number
of journals through other online vendors, I thought it would be nice to
have holdings notes that point users to the source for the full text
when we have it available.  We have a large periodical list, over 12,000
titles, most of them available through internet vendors.  

It turns out that ProQuest requires the holdings to be in the following
format:
Title|ISSN|Start Date|End|Date|Microform|Paper|CD-ROM|Note

First problem:  they only list microform, paper and CD-ROM as format
options. And you MUST select one of those formats with a "y" otherwise
the entry will not be accepted.	  Most of the journals we have access to
come from online databases.  I asked UMI's technical support about that
("Have you guys heard about the "Internet"?  I've heard it's going to be
a really big thing someday...") and was told that this might be an
option in the future versions, but right now, you must specify one of
the more traditional formats and you can't use HTML links as part of the
holdings field.

The next problem is that, for a large number of journals we have them
from several sources.  We may have a print subscription plus have the
same title supplied by more than one online database, and the dates of
coverage will be different for the print subscription and in the
individual online databases.  So ideally, instead of giving a start and
end date, I'd rather just have the title, ISSN, and a note that tells
users to check our online periodical list.  However, the start and end
dates are NOT optional data fields.

Has anyone found a workaround for these limitations?  

Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Manhattan College Libraries
spober at manhattan.edu
http://www.manhattan.edu/library