How will I use SUNCAT?

Researcher / life-long learner: Ruby

It is nearly December 2005, and Ruby Tregold, part-time lecturer-cum-contract-researcher, perpetual student and life-long learner, is trying to finish that review paper she had agreed to write. She will need additional information on material with which she is familiar but also on the economics of information and other more technical areas in journals with which she is not familiar. Having consulted the A&I databases to which her institution subscribes, and checked the local library OPAC, she can't find what she wants, and worse than that, she doesn't feel confident that she has done enough to discover literature in the journals outside her discipline, especially those published internationally.

Task 1: She spots the SUNCAT button on the library portal; the help side-bar suggests this can be used to find material held in other UK libraries. Once inside SUNCAT, she finds that three key references are in the library of the neighbouring university and two are in a city that she will be visiting next week to attend a seminar. The so-called holdings statements are very odd but she can make out that they should all have the journal volumes she needs, and fortunately there is a link to the web site of that city library that shows opening hours, and how to get there from the railway station. That just leaves that one must-read article, and the What Next button in SUNCAT provides a link (which she barely notices is via the JISC Journals Portal to the appropriate copies using Balsa and/or SFX), to present Ruby with the options to select an electronic copy for payment or to order an inter-library loan through her local library.

Task 2: Having used SUNCAT successfully to locate copies of the articles in the journals Ruby knows about using SUNCAT. She is amazed to see that she can also carry out a subject search to discover relevant journals. Amazingly, there are also links from SUNCAT that open up a new browser window onto the publisher's website. This lists summary information about articles that are in the contents of recent issues. Armed with these she returns to her first task to track down where these are located.

Saved by SUNCAT.