SUNCAT: So long, and thanks for all the fish!

It is time to say goodbye to all the SUNCAT Contributing Libraries, researchers and users (but we are still around until 5pm on the 31st July – so carry on using us until then!). We have been a long time running (“old and reliable” has been one description), and it is now time to hand over the baton of the national union catalogue to the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase. SUNCAT has been the serials union catalogue for the UK research community, delivered by EDINA on behalf of Jisc.

SUNCAT has enabled researchers, students, librarians and others to locate serials held in libraries across the UK. The catalogue contains information on both electronic and print serials (and in other formats!), including journals, periodicals, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, annual reports and other publications of a continuing nature. SUNCAT also contains high quality bibliographic records, which allows libraries to upgrade their own catalogues, and offers other services such as personalised searches and a serial comparison holding tool.

In 2003, a two year tender was awarded to EDINA to create and maintain a National Union Catalogue of Serials. Ex Libris were project partners with EDINA: Ex Libris supplied the Library Management System Aleph that underpinned SUNCAT for many years. In addition, representatives from a selection of libraries holding large serials collections worked closely with the project team as early contributors and associate partners.

SUNCAT was moved from project to service in 2007, and has been steadily growing since then. In 2016, the final work on the service was completed: in the previous couple of years, we had designed a new front and back end, moving away from Aleph to a bespoke system that allowed more flexibility with searching, refining, matching, to create an improved and more user friendly catalogue. Our ingest process was speeded up considerably, allowing SUNCAT to increase the number of Contributing Libraries with no fear of not making our SLA targets.  

By the end of service, SUNCAT contains:

·         The bibliographic records and holdings of 120 Contributing Libraries, including the data sets from CONSER, the ISSN, and the Directory of Open Access Journals.

·         A database containing over 10 million serials bibliographic records and associated holdings.

·         Nearly 87 million records ever loaded into the SUNCAT database, over the lifetime of the service.

·         Contributing Libraries including the National Libraries, the Copyright Libraries, many University libraries and specialist libraries.

·         Specialist libraries cover all subject areas, from the British Film Institute, through to the Institute of Cancer Research, Lambeth Palace and the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide.

·         Data received in all sorts of formats (lots of acronyms coming up!): AACR, AACR2, AACR2r, RDA, MARC21, UKMARC, USMARC, XML, MARCXML, Word documents, Access databases, Excel spreadsheets – and anything else (including combinations of the above)… and are all normalised into MARC21 in a MARCXML wrapper.

·         On average, SUNCAT receives between 60 and 70 updates a month.

·         The physical libraries range from the North of Scotland (Inverness), to the British Antarctic Survey in South Georgia, and the British Antarctic Survey in Rothera.

·         Titles ranging from “A magazine” to “ZZZZZZ” – and everything in-between!

It was decided in 2012 that SUNCAT needed more functionality than was currently being offered by the Aleph interface which had been in use since 2003. The decision was made to bring development in-house, and we had a brilliant team who helped re-design the front end, including the map which showed the physical location of all the SUNCAT Contributing Libraries. Did you ever pull the map out to show the world? You might have noticed our two most remote libraries, based in Antarctica. We even wrote a blog post on them, when the NERC libraries were added to SUNCAT, complete with a picture of the base at Rothera (and obligatory penguins).

Once the work on the front end had been completed, it was clear that the back end also needed redevelopment. This was also done in-house, creating a completely new ingest process based on Solr and zebra databases. As I noted above, it was completed in 2016, and managing updates and loading has been speeded up considerably.

 

Of course, my final point, and the most important, is to note that none of the work associated with SUNCAT would have been achieved and contributed to its longevity without the input of the SUNCAT Contributing Libraries. Starting off with those who sent their data early, so that we could work out our processes and data streams, to those who have come on board more recently to get a handle on data export, I salute you. Thank you for being part of SUNCAT: we could not have done anything without your belief in what we were trying to achieve, your dedication, your work, and your data! We have loved receiving your data, in whatever format, and I hope that your inclusion in SUNCAT raised the visibility of your holdings through another forum, and that you have enjoyed being part of SUNCAT.

 

And now it is time for me to sign off, and thank you all again for being part of SUNCAT, and wish you all the best for the future. The past 16 years have been a blast – THANK YOU!

 

(A picture of my original SUNCAT – Tari sunbathing in the window)

(And my newest SUNCAT – Logan, being all kitten-y in the sunshine… not bad for a 15-year old!)

SUNCAT Contributing Libraries: how to get involved with the NBK

Bethan Ruddock, the NBK Project Manager, has written a few words on how the SUNCAT libraries can contribute to the NBK. I hope that you find this useful, and that it encourages you to contact the NBK team, if you haven’t done so already!

I would like to reiterate – as I’m sure that I will be doing a lot over the next few months – that we really appreciate the work that our Contributing Libraries have put into sending us data over the years. SUNCAT would be nothing without the libraries, and their enthusiasm. May this carry on with contributions to the NBK!

Bethan says:

The Jisc National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) is a project to aggregate bibliographic data at scale and link with a number of other data sources to inform library collection management decisions and to help users more effective find, access and use print and digital scholarly resources.

The NBK data will support 3 main services: resource discovery, collection management, and catalogue record download. The resource discovery service with take over from the current Copac and SUNCAT services at the end of July 2019.

To ensure continued excellent coverage of UK serials holdings as established by SUNCAT, we would like to invite and encourage all current SUNCAT contributors to contribute their data to the NBK. This invitation isn’t limited to serial holdings: we’d be very pleased to get full catalogues from you. For SUNCAT contributors, we are offering the option of sending an initial contribution of serial holdings, allowing you time to consider sending your full holdings later.

More information on contributing can be found at https://contribute.copac.jisc.ac.uk/documentation/ (login with Shibboleth / Open Athens, or contact nbk.copac@jisc.ac.uk to request access). If you have any questions about the NBK, or would like to arrange to contribute, we’d be very pleased to hear from you at nbk.copac@jisc.ac.uk.

 

 

SUNCAT and the NBK – a webinar

We would like to invite members of our Contributing Libraries to a joint webinar hosted by SUNCAT and the NBK (National Bibliographic Knowledgebase). This webinar will take place on the 20th November, 2018, at 2:30 pm for an hour.

We will cover the impending retirement of SUNCAT, and the service until then. Bethan Ruddock, the NBK Project Manager, will introduce the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase, and inform the SUNCAT Contributing Libraries on joining the NBK. We expect that half of the webinar will be open to the floor for any questions that you might have regarding SUNCAT and the NBK.

If you wish to have any background information regarding the SUNCAT retirement, we have a blog post on the subject.

If you wish to join the webinar, please register at this link.

We would suggest that at least one member of the SUNCAT Contributing Libraries register for this event, in order to receive the most current information regarding the SUNCAT retirement and the handover to the NBK.

Slides and notes will be reproduced in a SUNCAT blog post after the event, and a transcript of the questions and answers will be sent to attendees, and included as part of the blog post. If there is demand, we may re-run and update the webinar.

If you have any questions, please contact the SUNCAT team at suncat@ed.ac.uk. We look forward to seeing you at the webinar.

Sunsetting SUNCAT

SUNCAT will end as a service on the 31st July 2019.  The rationale for retiring SUNCAT comes from a lengthy consultation with the academic library community that resulted in a requirement for a new service that was capable of working at much greater scale to deliver a comprehensive view onto the bibliographic and holdings data of all UK academic libraries.  A new national service is in development that will supersede both the SUNCAT service and its sister service, Copac. The Jisc National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) will be a national-scale aggregated bibliographic database which will facilitate resource discovery, collection management and cataloguing.

It is business as usual for now for SUNCAT, please continue to send data.  EDINA and Jisc will co-host a webinar later in the year with a fuller update and time line on the process of retiring SUNCAT.  EDINA will also send out regular updates to keep you informed.

To achieve the goal of comprehensive coverage, Jisc would like to encourage current SUNCAT contributors to start submitting their data to the NBK as soon as possible in order that the transition between services is as smooth as possible. The intention is to launch the NBK ‘live’ service in February 2019. It will then run in parallel with SUNCAT until its retirement at the end of July 2019.  If you’d like to send your data, discuss the benefits of joining the NBK, or have any other questions about the NBK, please contact nbk.copac@jisc.ac.uk

Should you have queries regarding SUNCAT service retirement, please contact edina@ed.ac.uk.  If you have any queries regarding the NBK, please contact nbk.copac@jisc.ac.uk

MediaHub Service Changes Update: MediaPlus and the future of this blog

Following on from previous notification please note that from today, 1 September 2016, the MediaHub subscription service is no longer available. However, all the multimedia content that Jisc has licensed for use by higher and further education institutions, which is currently accessed via the MediaHub subscription, is available through a new service, MediaPlus, at http://mediaplus.alexanderstreet.com.

This blog is currently being retained as an archive, so that the blog posts and resources around using multimedia content in teaching and learning remain available to the Higher and Further Education community. The blog will not be actively updated and if you have any questions about the content, please email: edina@ed.ac.uk.

 

Recent improvements to SUNCAT

A recent release of SUNCAT includes two new features: My SUNCAT, and a serials holdings comparison service.

My SUNCAT

My SUNCAT allows users to sign in to SUNCAT and save searches to reuse at a later date,  save records and organise them into lists, and create custom groups of libraries and locations to use in searches.   To find out more please see our My SUNCAT Guide.

Serials Holdings Comparison service

We’re also pleased to announce that the holdings comparison service that SUNCAT offers to the UKRR has been extended to enable libraries to run their own serials holdings comparisons against the data held in SUNCAT.   This free tool allows libraries to compare holdings for serials across more than 100 UK academic and research libraries.  Libraries can discover which serials are rare or unique, which are widely held and which are marked for UKRR retention.  Analysis can be made at the national level or the local level by selecting particular libraries to include in the comparison.

The results can help libraries make decisions about:

  • Keeping older print serials or moving them into storage
  • Deselecting lower use print serials if commonly held
  • Collaborating with other libraries to ensure sustainable access to at least one copy of a serial
  • Cancelling or renewing current subscriptions depending on alternative access locally or via ILL.

To find out more about using the serials holdings comparison service, please see http://www.suncat.ac.uk/librarians/holdings-comparison-service.html.

Mediahub Service Changes

From 1 September 2016 the MediaHub subscription service will no longer be available. However, all the multimedia content that Jisc has licensed for use by higher and further education institutions, which is currently accessed via the MediaHub subscription, will be made available through a new service, MediaPlus.

MediaPlus will be hosted and delivered to existing, and new, subscribers by Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company with a strong presence in the UK academic sector. All Jisc-licensed news, film, image and music content including high profile collections such as ITN, Getty images and Wellcome Library images and sound will continue to be available to you, but new content, services and benefits will also be included such as Teachers’ TV and other cross-searchable collections, hence the name MedaPlus. The new service will be available at http://mediaplus.alexanderstreet.com on 1st September.

As part of the transition between MediaHub and MediaPlus, during the month of August the current service will still be available with maintenance being kept to a minimum.

For more information about MediaPlus, please contact: mediaplus@alexanderstreet.com.