LCCN, April 23, 2013 ISSN 2324-6464 Building the Library's serials collections through Copyright deposit By Theron Westervelt The Library of Congress is an institution that garners a lot of respect for many reasons: its collections and its catalog, its programs and its leadership. The Library's success in accomplishing all this has been the result of generous congressional support, many individual decisions and actions, and much hard work. One key element in making the Library what it is today has been the copyright laws. Copyright is established in the US Constitution and the first copyright law took effect in 1790. Starting with the law enacted in 1870 to replace earlier copyright laws, the Library is entitled to two copies, delivered free of charge, of each copyrightable publication distributed within the United States. Given the sheer size of the publishing industry in this country, it is not too great an exaggeration to visualize the copyright laws as having the similar effect on the Library that the old Charles Atlas program had on teenage boys, turning ninety-eight pound weaklings into weightlifting champs. These laws apply not merely to books and nonprint formats, but to serials as well, and to each issue of each serial - there is no getting away with sending the first issue and letting it drop. And all these serials, once they have made their way through the Copyright Office, come to the two serials sections in the US General Division as they enter Library Services. We receive between 150,000 and 200,000 individual serial issues each year, delivered from the Copyright Office in tubs the size of commercial laundry hampers almost every day of the week. Since the essence of a serial is that it is a common wrapper for discrete new content issued (usually) at set intervals and generally (though not always) within a specific field of interest, the vast majority of these individual issues already have complete bibliographic records in the ILS. Our expert serials technicians are at the forefront of dealing with this daily avalanche of publications.by checking them into the Integrated Library System (ILS). They begin by sorting the incoming tubs of serials into a few basic categories in order to expedite processing: periodicals (pieces that are published more frequently than once a year and, once we are done with them, generally go to Serial and Government Publications Division or the Law Library until enough arrive to be bound together); self-contained units or SCUs (pieces that will be bound individually); Law self-contained units (which need to receive special attention, mostly due to the idiosyncrasies of the legal publishers and the particular needs of the Law Library); and high-risk material, such as CD-ROMs and comic books, which are stored in a secure, locked room. When the incoming receipts have received this ordering, the section heads assign shelves of work to the technicians, who process the receipts: checking them into the ILS, labeling them and routing them to the appropriate collection location. It sounds easy when described like this. However, publishers, for some reason, do not tend to operate with the interests of serials librarians foremost in their minds-nor are they obliged to do so. They hide the enumeration and chronology or they change it or they remove one or the other altogether. They change the frequency with which they publish new issues. They change the title substantially enough that it needs a new record, even though the publisher sees it as just some new marketing of the same old journal. Or they change the title in what we consider a minor way, but that they see as creating a new entity entirely. And then of course, they do create entirely new serials, more every day. So the technicians are constantly in the process of creating new purchase orders, choosing new publication patterns, checking in pieces on the holdings record in those cases no discernable publication exists, updating the frequency (or the publisher) on the bib record and forwarding new titles and trickier questions about the bibliographic records to the serials catalogers. The serials cataloger who trained me once said that, if he were hiring a new serials cataloger, he would ask if that person liked crossword puzzles. I think this is apt, for cataloging serials requires an interest in solving puzzles. Occasionally a serials cataloger will have multiple issues of a serial from which to catalog the title. Generally, though, it is just a single piece from which you must create a record that will describe not merely what you have in hand, but any other issues of that serial, including those that have not yet been published. The concept of relationships, of one issue to others and often of one title to others, is crucial in serials cataloging, and our catalogers and copy catalogers must prioritize it in their work. All of this serials work - from sorting to processing to cataloging - is done for all formats of serials: print, microform, CD-ROM, online, etc. The last of these, however, has, until recently, not been a major part of our work. A regulatory exception to the copyright law meant that online publications did not have to be deposited with the Library. However, a change in the regulation in early 2010 allowed the Library to begin demanding serials published online-only for addition to its collection. This content must be free of any digital rights management (DRM), to allow us to manage both preservation and long-term access according to the needs of our mission. Starting the following autumn, the Copyright Acquisition Division (CAD) sent out demands for 98 titles from 31 publishers for e-serials. Since these are all serial titles received via copyright, the processing and cataloging of them is the responsibility of the two serials sections in the US General Division. In conjunction with CAD, we worked with the Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) to develop the Delivery Management System (DMS), which allows us to view, process, and catalog these titles and to send them to long-term storage on a server. This has meant that we can accession and maintain control over our receipts, but it has also meant that they require a lot of work on our part before we can add them to the collection. The same variability in publication practices for print serials is magnified when it comes to online serials. We have managed to leverage our knowledge of cataloging serials across formats to accommodate cataloging e-serials as well. But many publishers, even some of the bigger ones, are still learning how online publishing works and how it should work, long-term - and it shows. What they send us needs to be examined thoroughly: did they send all they should or are parts of an issue (or an article) missing? Is this content what they told us they would be sending? Is it rendering properly so that it can actually be read? Confirming all this takes a lot of time and effort, especially in these early days. And even if all this is fine, the technicians need to link the content to the appropriate volume and issue for the title, which metadata they probably had to create in the first place, for some publishers send no metadata and others offer it in ways that cannot be extracted automatically. Even in the online world, there is as yet no end of serials check-in. Happily, the serials staff has been very engaged in this work, not merely in processing and cataloging, but in testing each new iteration of the DMS and in providing feedback. And the more we learn, the more we are improving both our manual and automated processes. With the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate (ABA), CAD and OSI working closely together, the DMS has grown and improved dramatically in the past two years. The system is now able to extract more metadata automatically, which cuts down on the manual labor involved in processing e-serials enormously. Just recently, we have demanded eighty-nine more titles and are looking at even more in the coming year. And we'll have to keep doing that , as the number of serials published online keeps growing each year, as does the number of print serials, and we'll keep them moving from the Copyright Office to the collections, maintaining the Library in its champion weightlifter condition. _____ At end of posting: Disclaimer: This message does not represent official Library of Congress communications. Links to external Internet sites on Library of Congress Web pages do not constitute the Library's endorsement of the content of their Web sites or of their policies or products. Please read our Standard Disclaimer. (http://www.loc.gov/global/disclaim.html) LCCN is available in electronic form only and is free of charge. To subscribe, send a mail message to [email protected] with the text: subscribe lccn [firstname lastname]. Please be sure that the text is the body of the message, not the subject line. And if you wish to see previous postings from this listserv, go to http://sun8.loc.gov/listarch/lccn.html Melanie Polutta Library of Congress LCCN Editor
