The FTP server that our Contributing Libraries use to send us their updates will be unavailable for a short time, between 5 and 6pm next Wednesday 22nd April, to allow for essential maintenance. This means that it won’t be possible to transfer any files in this time period.
If you are a SUNCAT Contributor please pass this on to whoever is responsible for sending your update files.
If you have any queries or concerns about the above please contact the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.
We would like to invite you to a free “Introduction to SUNCAT” webinar at 3pm on Wednesday 22nd April. The session will be delivered by Zena, who provides support for SUNCAT, primarily on the user requirements, support and liaison side of the service.
The webinar will last around 45 minutes and will include:
Click on the link below to register for the webinar
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6813975188589463042
NOTE: immediately after you register you will receive an email from the EDINA Help Desk with a link to join the webinar. Please check your spam folder if you do not receive the email.
We hope you can take the time to join us next month and fill in any gaps about your knowledge of SUNCAT and find out what we are working on next!
In a recent release of SUNCAT we reintroduced browse functionality which had been missing since we moved over to the new interface last year.
Although searching is probably the more common way of finding a known item (especially since the arrival of Google), browsing can prove useful if you aren’t quite sure what it is you are looking for. It can lead to serendipitous and new discoveries and help you find out about the unknown unknowns!
You can start browsing by clicking on the “Browse� link underneath the search boxes on the service homepage/basic search page. There is also a link in the navigation section on the top left hand side of all the remaining service pages.
Click on the “Browse” link on the SUNCAT homepage
To start browsing just enter a term(s) or the first few letters of a term into the browse box and choose what you would like to browse by, e.g. by title, by subject, by publisher etc. and click on the “Browse� button.
Enter your term(s) and select an index
You can browse by:
A list of results will open up beneath the browse box at the appropriate point in the alphabetical listing for the index you have chosen. So the top result might be the exact term(s) you entered, if it exists in SUNCAT, but if not, it will be the closest term after this alphabetically. For example, if you choose to browse by title and enter the term “beards� the results will start with “Beardsley news�. From here you can either use the “Forward� or “Back� navigation buttons to browse back or forward in the alphabetical listing.
The number of serial records associated with each result is displayed in the right hand column. Click on a result to view these records.
Click on a result to view the associated records
There are also two additional numerical indexes available ISBN and ISSN (the international unique identifiers for monographs and serials).
If you have any queries about the browse feature or SUNCAT in general please contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.
SUNCAT will be upgraded in the middle of next week with a release including a number of new features and fixes to some existing bugs.
The most significant new addition will enable you to browse as well as search SUNCAT. You can access the browse options by clicking on the link underneath the search boxes on the homepage or from the navigation menu on the left hand side of the other pages.
There are a range of indexes available for browsing including:
Entering a term and browsing on any of the indexes will take you to the nearest point on that index and enable you to browse alphabetically forwards and backwards.
Other new features comprise:
We hope you find the new functionality helpful and easy to use, please let us have any feedback via the “Contact” link at the foot of all the SUNCAT pages or via the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.
We are very pleased that SUNCAT has just added its 100th Contributing Library, the National Archives. Reaching 100 Contributing Libraries is a landmark for SUNCAT highlighting it as the most comprehensive source of journal holding information in the UK. SUNCAT contains the holdings of all the UK legal deposit libraries:
In addition, it has over 50 Higher Education Libraries from across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, including all those of the Russell Group.
SUNCAT also has a range of specialist libraries covering a wide variety of disciplines including art; music; history; medicine; science; horticulture and the environment.
By incorporating information from all these libraries SUNCAT can help you uncover new or unique journals in a particular field, help you locate copies held closest to you or where you can apply for a copy of an article. The service can also highlight those journals which are widely held and more importantly where the one or two copies of more unusual titles are available.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our Contributors for working with us to keep SUNCAT as comprehensive, accurate and current as possible!
To find out more information and directions to all the locations of each of the 100 Contributing Libraries click on the library locations map.
We are not stopping at 100Â libraries and are keen to add more UK Higher Education, Specialist and Public Libraries, so if you are interested in contributing please see the earlier Contributing to SUNCAT is easy post.
For further information and news about SUNCAT please see our website, follow SUNCAT on Twitter (@suncatteam), or contact the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.
SUNCAT contains the serials bibliographic and holdings information of 100 UK libraries and we are continuing to expand.
Our Contributing Libraries include:
We are always happy to hear from institutions interesting in contributing their serials information and would like to reassure you that the process is pretty simple. All we would ask you to do is:
More information is available on our website
Benefits of contributing to the service include:
If you are interested in contributing please get in touch with us via the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk – you might become our 101st Contributing Library!
I attended the Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2014 Conference at Olympia a couple of weeks ago and found the opportunity to talk about our experience of transforming SUNCAT, learning about the latest library trends and generally meeting follow Librarians very useful.
My presentation is available on the SUNCAT website but unfortunately the other presentations from the conference are password protected.
After mistakenly trying to join some of the numerous other conferences taking place at Olympia at the same time some of the highlights for me included:
The opening keynote from Michael Edson of the Smithsonian who talked about the dark matter of the Internet – the huge amount of cultural activity on the Internet which is valuable but difficult to capture so is not well covered by our cultural institutions. He made particular reference to the Vlog Brothers who you can check out at http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers
A number of the speakers spoke extensively about or at least touched upon the changing and new roles available for Librarians with the advent of new trends and technologies. Developments in publishing, open access, open source, mobile apps and research data management were highlighted by Brian Kelly (CETIS) as key findings from the 2014 NMC Horizon Report for Libraries.
Suzanne Enright from the University of Westminster described how they used Agile Methodology to develop a Virtual Research Environment, while Mary Antonesa from Maynooth University Library presented on the development of a simple directional app to assist users find locations and items.
Ben Showers Head of Scholarly and Library Futures at Jisc encouraged us to follow three principles when collecting and measuring metrics:
And finally of great interest was the presentation around engaging users in the tender exercise for a new LMS and discovery tool at the Open University. This included setting up a user panel, interview and observation sessions and creating wireframe prototypes to gather initial feedback. Sodertorn University in Sweden also conducted similar exercises with users and discovered the importance of:
All very helpful as we continue to develop the SUNCAT service…
We announced back in November 2012 that we would be developing a new SUNCAT interface and have posted a number of items about the development along the way. Now, following the positive feedback on the new interface from the last survey, we would like to retire the original SUNCAT interface at the end of next month on Friday 26th September.
The original interface was went live as a pilot service in early 2005, and proved to be popular for it’s simplicity and ease of use, but we hope you agree that the new interface represents a significant improvement and modernisation of the SUNCAT service.
We would be grateful if you could move to using the new interface, if you haven’t already, as soon as possible and also if you could update any bookmarks accordingly. The address for the homepage of the new service remains as http://suncat.ac.uk.
One feature which will no longer be available is the Google search gadget (http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&url=http://www.suncat.ac.uk/ig/suncat-search.xml). We understand that Google will not support this in the long term so we have not updated this to work with the new interface. If, however, there is sufficient interest we would be happy to investigate providing an alternative as a future development.
Please also contact us as soon as possible via the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk if you have any queries or concerns about this or the switch off of the original interface in general.
We’ve just published the report from the survey we conducted on the new look SUNCAT. The survey ran from the end of May to the end of June 2014.
The results of the survey were largely very positive but it did highlight a few areas where we can focus on making improvements.
The vast majority of respondents, 88%, found SUNCAT “Quite Easy” or “Very Easy” to use. Five percent reported that they found SUNCAT “Very Difficult” to use and on further investigation this was revealed to be due to a compatibility problem with older versions of Internet Explorer. However, as soon as we noticed these responses we investigated and we believe that these issues are now resolved, see the blog post: Problems using the new service on the IE8 browser
Further, 91% of respondents indicated that they found the new service better than the original one.
The most popular features on the new SUNCAT with the highest proportion of respondents reporting that they were either “Very useful� or “Quite useful� were:
| Feature | Popularity (Percentage of Respondents Reporting the Feature as Useful or Very Useful) |
| Links to library’s local catalogues in the holdings display | 91 |
| Icons differentiating print and online holdings in the holdings display | 90 |
| Electronic only/non-electronic only format limit on the advanced search page | 86 |
| More search options on the advanced search page | 86 |
| Library information pages (linked to from library name in the holdings display) | 82 |
| Results automatically ranked by relevance | 77 |
| Post-search filters on left-hand side of the results screen | 75 |
| More flexible and granular library and location limits on the basic search page | 68 |
| Option to choose how many results to view per page | 67 |
| Expanded table of contents (available on more titles) | 63 |
| Auto-suggestions on entering search terms | 54 |
| Map of all Contributing library locations on the basic search page | 26 |
| Newsfeed from the SUNCAT Blog on the basic search page | 17 |
Respondents were also asked to comment on their favourite features. The most popular features were the format limiting, format filtering and format icons.
“I really like being able to tell at a glance whether a library has print or online holdings for a particular journal.�
“… is especially useful as it alerts to licensing issues etc. and therefore prevents requests that will fail and saves time in getting information to the library user.�
Second to these were the additional library information pages and the links to local catalogues:
“The improved links through to library information and the links to the local library catalogue is a big improvement.�
“The new library information pages are very helpful as I work in Interlibrary loans and this feature gives me important information very quickly without having to try and locate it on the library’s own website or in the BL’s directory of library codes.â€�
Followed by the clear design, ease of use and general usefulness of the new service:
“Cleaner, easier to read and navigate�
“much nicer interface – much more obvious in terms of how to use itâ€�
We also used the survey to find out what improvements our users would like to see in SUNCAT so that we can use this information to plan and prioritise our future developments. The following table summarises the suggestions and EDINA’s responses.
| Suggested Improvement | EDINA Response |
| Ensure the new service is compatible with older browsers | We have investigated this and believe that the necessary changes have now been implemented |
| Add more libraries | We will continue to expand the coverage of the service and are currently in the process of adding new libraries |
| Improve deduplication | We are gathering information about suggested matches on the service and will use this information to inform the development of an improved matching algorithm which should improve deduplication in the long term. |
| Improve holdings information | Unfortunately, we have no control over this as we rely on the holdings information supplied to us by our Contributing Libraries |
| A bulk upload facility of ISSNs to enable scarcity checks | We are in the process of developing a holdings comparison service which should assist with scarcity checking |
| UKRR libraries limit | We are in the process of developing tailored or customised views onto SUNCAT, one of which could be for the UKRR. |
| Improve relevance ranking | We will investigate possible improvements in this area. |
| Reinstate subject heading browsing | This will be made available in an upcoming release |
| Provide better options for printing holdings dataPrinting results. It would be helpful if you could print a short summary with selected location details without the need to print irrelevant web-page data too. | We will investigate possible improvements in this area. |
| Provide information about policies on ILL provision and licensing agreements | We will investigate the possibility of pulling this information from sources such as KB+, while bearing in mind that recent changes to UK Copyright Law might make licensing information less relevant for ILL purposes. |
| Move the British Library code to appear beside the library name | This information is displayed on the Library Information page which can be accessed by clicking on the Library name in the holdings display. We feel that adding this information directly to the holdings display could complicate and confuse the display for general users, but we will keep this request under consideration. |
| Split up electronic and print holdings or show more clearly | We are working to improve how the format filtering works and will consider adding the format limit to the basic search page. |
The results of the survey are very positive for the new SUNCAT service and indicate it now provides an overall improved platform from which to continue to develop the service further.
Unfortunately there were some initial problems with compatibility with older browsers, which the survey very usefully highlighted. Otherwise the responses to the new features are encouraging, with the vast majority of respondents finding the new service easy to use and an improvement on the original service.
Key features appear as those related to identifying, distinguishing between, limiting to or filtering out particular journal formats. This reflects a high number of users wanting to focus on non-electronic formats due to licence restrictions on providing copies from electronic formats. However, the additional information provided on the library pages and the links to local catalogues also proved popular.
We will give further consideration to each of the suggested improvements and where possible investigate developing these as part of future releases. In some cases the developments are already in the pipeline and the survey provides an additional confirmation of their potential usefulness.