The national union catalogue of serials for the UK research community will be launched as a pilot service in January 2005. SUNCAT has two main purposes:
SUNCAT includes over twenty of the largest research libraries accounting for a critical mass, perhaps over 90%, of journal and other serial titles held in UK.
JISC is funding Phase 2, as pilot service and as development activity. Over the next 2 years, improvements in the SUNCAT service will include increased coverage as holdings from more research libraries are added and enhanced matching to increase de-duplication. The SUNCAT team will carry out project activity on emerging international protocols and formats for handling electronic journals and subscription information in a union catalogue.
The achievements of the SUNCAT project team at the University of Edinburgh were recognised in this year’s awards at Online Information in December 2004, where they were chosen as finalists for the Best Information/Knowledge team in an Academic Environment.
For further details see http://www.suncat.ac.uk and Newsline 9.3.