Libraries spend a fair bit of time making sure that their collection is up to date. A variety of methods are used to achieve this, but they generally involve quite a bit of manual work.
One thing that would greatly aid collection development would be if librarians could be notified of new editions of books currently in their collection. Is anyone aware of any service / software that offers this functionality? Presumably it could work by the MARC holdings (entire or subset) of a library being matched against a large bibliographic database (something like WorldCat , Books in Print, Electre etc ). Broadly speaking, this matching would be some combination: 1) Title and author matching 2) ISBN of held item against previous edition field 3) Edition number (in conjunction with other matches above) The system would alert you to possible new editions (later in publication year) of your current holdings. The ability to do the same thing with other formats (csv etc) would also be nice. Of course it would be more probabilistic than exact (with the exception of previous edition matching) due to variations in title, author, cataloguing standards, how editions are specified (3rd versus Third) and so on but it would be a good starting point. Another nice feature would be to have such a system be able to run manually or at specified periods. Any comments, suggestions welcome (and offers to build even more so - I know our library would be happy to pay for such a service) Thanks, Rob Penfold (Queensland Health) (rob.penf...@health.qld.gov.au) Floriane Muller (Bibliothèque de l'Université de Genève) Samantha Lee-Anne Hilton (Queensland Health) ******************************************************************************** This email, including any attachments sent with it, is confidential and for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). This confidentiality is not waived or lost, if you receive it and you are not the intended recipient(s), or if it is transmitted/received in error. Any unauthorised use, alteration, disclosure, distribution or review of this email is strictly prohibited. The information contained in this email, including any attachment sent with it, may be subject to a statutory duty of confidentiality if it relates to health service matters. If you are not the intended recipient(s), or if you have received this email in error, you are asked to immediately notify the sender by telephone collect on Australia +61 1800 198 175 or by return email. You should also delete this email, and any copies, from your computer system network and destroy any hard copies produced. If not an intended recipient of this email, you must not copy, distribute or take any action(s) that relies on it; any form of disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication of this email is also prohibited. Although Queensland Health takes all reasonable steps to ensure this email does not contain malicious software, Queensland Health does not accept responsibility for the consequences if any person's computer inadvertently suffers any disruption to services, loss of information, harm or is infected with a virus, other malicious computer programme or code that may occur as a consequence of receiving this email. Unless stated otherwise, this email represents only the views of the sender and not the views of the Queensland Government. **********************************************************************************
