SUNCAT is a freely available service which enables researchers, librarians, students, anyone basically, to search for serials which are also known as journals, and such materials, held in libraries throughout the UK.
We’ve got the holdings... serial holdings of seventy-nine libraries at the moment, which is increasing, including the largest libraries. We’ve got all the copyright libraries such as the British Library, National Library of Scotland and Wales, and some of the largest higher education institutions in the UK such as Oxford and Cambridge and so forth, as well as some specialist libraries such as the Wellcome Institute for the history of medicine.
Our contributing libraries are distributed across the UK, so we go as far north as Aberdeen up in the north of Scotland down to Exeter in the southwest. In the west we’ve got Queens University, Belfast, and in the east we’ve got the University of East Anglia.
We also have three datasets which are the ISSN Register, the CONSER Database, and the Directory of Open Access Journals. We have new libraries being added on a regular basis – this year, for example, we’re hoping to get, as a start, the Institution of Civil Engineers, Bath University, and the Royal Asiatic Society – they should be added in the next couple of months.
In the past year we’ve added the Open University and Trinity College, Dublin, which is our only non-UK library. We update it regularly, so that the information in SUNCAT is hopefully as current as it is in the library’s catalogues.
We contain information on serials, print, electronic, microfilm – basically any format – and serials includes journals, periodicals, newspapers, newsletters, magazines, annual reports, and basically any item of a continuing nature.
The main function, the absolute key function, is a locate service; SUNCAT tells you where things are held in the UK. We are the most comprehensive source of UK serials holding information, and we’ve got over six million bibliographic records in the database at the moment, and that number is always increasing. And the main benefit is that you only have to search for serials information in one place – you don’t have to go out to every single library catalogue to see what they’ve got, so we’re a one-stop shop.
SUNCAT is very simple to use, it’s got a very intuitive interface, and there’s a number of options for tailoring your search, so you can limit by geographic location down to city level; so you can go from country all the way down to city level. You can look for journals in your subject area, you can do a specific journal title search, and if you can limit... you can limit your search to the actual library that you want to go and visit if that’s what you want to do.
SUNCAT provides links to the library homepages which is useful for opening hours and visitor restrictions, and we have a map on our website which gives the locations for the libraries, as well as salient address information. We also link out to the SCONUL access scheme which gives you details on your level of access to the UK higher education libraries.
We also have a really useful feature which is the linking through to the latest table of contents feature on journals which are in Zetoc, which is a service run by the British Library. You can link through to the full text of the articles from the table of contents if your institution allows access. There’s also a ‘find your copy’ button which involves the Open URL router if you don’t have access through the table of contents feature.
SUNCAT is also a source of high quality bibliographic records. This is very useful for cataloguing features, so that if you want to catalogue a record... a serials record, come to SUNCAT first because you’ll be able to get a full level record which is obviously very useful, and contributing libraries can download MARC 21 records through the Z39.50 connection. Other libraries can also set up a Z39 connection, but they don’t have access to MARC records. They can have records in SUTRS or XML.
SUNCAT’s useful for a range of library staff as well as researchers who just want a locate facility. Frontline or service desk staff are helped with further location of items, and SUNCAT’s very useful for interlibrary loan staff as well because, again, they only have to search in one place for their items.
Subject to liaison librarians, acquisitions and serials librarians can also use SUNCAT just to see that the item actually exists if a reader comes in and says ‘I want you to buy this journal’, you can say ‘ah, I’ll check it on SUNCAT’, that sort of thing. And collections managers can use SUNCAT to have a look and see what other libraries are holding items that they’re thinking of buying so that they can either decide ‘yes we need this journal because nobody else is holding it near us’, or ‘we don’t have any links with the libraries that do hold it’, or they can say ‘no, lots of libraries are holding this, we don’t have to’.
SUNCAT’s also working with the UK Research Reserve, which is also known as the UKRR. And the UKRR enables libraries to dispose of low-use print journals, freeing up large areas of space, because of course space is always at a premium. But it also ensures that copies of these journals are kept both in the British Library and at least two other institutions, so guaranteeing continuing access.
And the information available on SUNCAT has proved invaluable in acting as a resource facility, as a locate facility, and giving comprehensive holding information so that the libraries know which parts of the journals they can dispose of.
We do surveys on a regular basis, and in the last survey ninety-three percent of respondents said that they would recommend SUNCAT to other people, which we feel is a great endorsement of the service. And the main reasons for recommendation were the ease and speed of using the service, the comprehensive coverage, and the fact that the service is accurate and reliable.
The first line of support is the EDINA Help Desk, either by email or by telephone, which is office hours, 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. Help Desk staff answer many of the calls, but if there’s anything really technical or specific that gets piped back to the SUNCAT team. Contributing libraries have direct access to the SUNCAT team, and we liaise a lot with them regarding their data. And more information can be found on the SUNCAT website – there’s lots of information on there, which should answer any... most questions, not any questions, that you have.