JISC

The RSLP, JISC and the British Library jointly funded a feasibility study in 2000/01 to explore the desirability and feasibility of a UK national union catalogue (NUC), or catalogues, for monographs and other types of material, including serials. The need for such a system is seen as important within the context of a co-ordinated distributed national collection of resources for research and learning. It is of importance here that the UKNUC study identified a particular need for the development of a national serials union catalogue.

The RSLP, JISC and the British Library subsequently funded a scoping study for a national serials union catalogue to: validate the technical model proposed; confirm the scope and initial boundaries of the proposed catalogue in terms of data content, institutional involvement and expected functionality; identify and consider financial models for setting up and running the union catalogue; identify the technical and resource implications for likely key data contributors and confirm their willingness to contribute to the catalogue; and identify required linkages to and from other serials related data and services.

The scoping study informed a tender process that resulted in EDINA at the University of Edinburgh being awarded the development of SUNCAT, in collaboration with Ex Libris.Phase 1 runs until the end of December 2004, with a further two-year phase to be taken forward on the basis of the first two years.  During Phase 1, SUNCAT will aim to achieve a critical mass of journal records by making use of the ISSN World Serials database and CONSER, the database of MARC21 serials records available from the Library of Congress in the USA, and will also work closely with 22 key national and academic libraries holding major serials collections in the UK.

The key users of the SUNCAT catalogue are expected to be researchers at all levels, inside and outside of UK Higher Education, for whom the catalogue will provide a mechanism for identifying the location of holdings of serials of interest to them held outside their home institution. The catalogue is also expected to have applicability for learning, particularly at undergraduate level but also beyond into the life long learning context. For librarians and contributing libraries SUNCAT will provide a centralised catalogue of high quality bibliographic records for serials held in UK libraries, and a mechanism whereby they can replace their own local records with standardised high quality records obtained from the central database.

SUNCAT is being built in the context of the information environment being developed in the UK for access to distributed printed and electronic resources in higher education, further education, the national libraries and beyond. Issues of technical and semantic interoperability are crucial to building a set of integrated services for end users. In particular, the JISC is building an infrastructure for journal article discovery, location, and delivery.