A nifty deal with Mary Ann Liebert means that we get extended back files on about 50 journal titles. Nice! Up to ten more years of online access! Love it!
Turns out that about half those journals have changed titles, sometimes multiple times (sometimes in mid-volume, sometimes back to the original title) in the time represented by the new coverage.
In the interests of accuracy, each variant of the title must of course have its own record, so basically we not only have more years of coverage, we have a bunch of additional journal titles for the collection!
It's kind of a pain to sort them all out, but it's nice for the stats.
I guess I should say, to be more accurate, that it's the kind of thing I actually sort of enjoy (tracing the course of titles, putting in 'continues' and 'continued by' notes, carefully detailing volume and issue numbers) but which is time consuming and therefore kind of a pain because it impedes my progress on the massive ebooks project.
A lot of things are like that. In theory, I enjoy the bits that are somewhat more challenging. Coming across a record with no Medical Subject Headings so I can find some for it, untangling the twisted web of mutated titles in a journal's history, that sort of thing.
In practice, it just takes up time, and that means more hours spent under the looming shadow of some project or other than you want to finish up so you can dive into the looming shadow of the next project.
Fortunately I'm good with looming shadow, because I burn easily in the sun.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment