a place to put your (perpetual access) stuff

i can’t write this blog post without a nod to george carlin, whose famous bit about “stuff” comes to mind as i’m thinking about a place to put our library’s “stuff.”  “stuff,” in this case, is our perpetual access holdings data for e-journals.

here’s our thinking so far on this topic.  getting the information about which electronic journal volumes we own forever was a difficult process, but an important one.  now we have an inventory of what we own, but the inventory is on an excel spreadsheet.  looking up an e-journal title in our catalog and then needing to refer to an external spreadsheet is a drag, and we think it would be preferable to store this information in our catalog with the rest of our inventoried collection.  where in the catalog to store the information, though?  we considered putting it an 8XX field of the bibliographic record but were swayed from that since those aren’t protected fields and can _so easily_ be overlaid.  we then considered putting the data in MFHD, but that format doesn’t give us the flexibility to call out that certain volumes may be available perpetually from one provider, whereas other volumes are available through a different provider.  we’re now considering creating item records for this data, so that we can enter the volumes/years available, as well as the provider for that perpetual access.  we’ll attach as many item records as necessary to a title so that the perpetual access holdings data is completely described.

what do you think about this?  where are you storing your perpetual access holdings “stuff”?

carlin on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac