Collection Anywhere Minutes - December 01, 2016

These are all good questions, and thank you so much for asking! I always appreciate the opportunity to share information about how the catalog works, how staff and members may use it more effectively, and to get ideas about how we in Cataloging can make changes to make it work even better.
First, a little background. The statement that “Catalogers are learning to catalog periodicals” unfortunately does not mean that we will be taking any action on records already in the catalog. I don’t know exactly when you joined MLS, but prior to our migration to CarlX, there were no records for magazines in the catalog. All magazine information was contained in a separate database and had to be searched separately. The records in that database were not in MARC format, which controls how records display in an OPAC.
When we migrated to the TLC system, the periodical database went away, and we were required to have MARC records for periodicals. Given the large number of titles and the limited time, Jimmy Welch created a program that took data in the periodical database records and converted it to a quasi-MARC format. It would be great if Cataloging had time to go back and clean up all those records, but we don’t. As MLS adds new magazine titles to its collections, Cataloging adds records for those titles to the catalog. I’ve been doing it, but am passing that responsibility on to the Catalogers. We don’t add new titles all that often; we have added less than 100 new magazine titles since August 2014, and some of them have been magazines that we already received, but which changed titles.
With that basic information out of the way, the answers to your questions are broken down into separate comments below.

Unfortunately, linking from catalog records for magazines to databases that contain those magazines is not as simple as it seems. Databases like Zinio, PressReader, etc., contain thousands of magazine titles, and MLS does not subscribe to all those titles in paper format. Cataloging staff would have to go through the entire list of periodicals in a database, determine whether MLS owns that periodical title, and insert a link to the database. It would be highly time consuming and would significantly delay Cataloging’s primary goal of getting new materials into users’ hands as quickly as possible.

A secondary issue is that these databases change the titles that they offer frequently, and without notice to libraries subscribing to the database. This would mean that even if we were able to add links to the databases to catalog records, there would be no guarantee that the links would work. I can only imagine the number of frustrated members that the broken links would cause! Just maintaining those links would be almost a full-time job.
In the future, if MLS subscribes to electronic versions of specific periodical titles, there is no reason that those links could not be added to catalog records. Also, Cataloging is beginning to explore adding catalog records for entire databases, as a means to inform users of their availability. I’m not sure that all databases are good candidates for that, but some may be.

Alternate title entries can quickly become a slippery slope. One thing that I have discovered in my years working in Cataloging and Interlibrary Loan is that no one can anticipate all the ways that users will search for a given title. It seems easy enough to add an entry for “Time magazine” on the assumption that users might search for that title, but when you start to consider all the possible variations of a title like “Consumer reports”, things get complicated.
I am also not sure whether this is a major problem for users. Online catalogs make it easier for users to find what they are looking for even with an inexact search. In your example, a search for “time magazine” in the OPAC will actually retrieve the record for the magazine. A search for “people magazine” will not, but a search for “people”, filtered by magazine, will. Without hard evidence that users are consistently or frequently unable to get to records for materials that they want or need, I prefer not to insert added entries.

It seems that the methods we currently have work fairly well; your count of 541 titles is accurate. I can understand your concern about the fact that items for some issues of magazines have been coded with the media code “book”; and that there are some “book” records in the catalog that actually represent magazine issues. Luckily, these few items don’t throw off the total count. As long as at least one issue of a magazine has the media code “magazine”, and at least one record for the magazine title is created as such, a search for the MZ collection will retrieve the title.
I am not sure why some issues have been coded as “books”, but I am sure it is an easy error to make. The “book” records for individual titles were mostly created in the early days of CarlX, when magazine checkin was still being figured out. If a member wanted to check out an issue, and the issue did not appear in CarlX, staff sometimes created temporary records to allow the issue to check out. That should no longer be happening.
You are correct that the search provided in the ILS Q&A does not retrieve all magazine titles. It is a flawed search in that it is based on the assumption that the term “frequency” appears in all records for magazine titles; it does not. It appears in records that were machine-generated from the old system, but not in new records generated by Cataloging. To locate records added by Cataloging, replace “frequency” in the search with “periodicals”. Unfortunately, I have not been able to come up with a method to combine both searches; LS2PAC does not seem to offer an “or” search option.
The CarlX Staff Client contains many more records for magazine titles than are retrieved using either the MZ collection search or the OPAC. Approximately half the titles listed no longer have active holdings; no MLS library currently subscribes to the title, and all issues have been withdrawn. The advantage of using the OPAC to search for periodicals is that it only displays results for titles with active holdings.
I would think that MSL could provide a list of all magazine titles that our libraries currently subscribe to, if that would be helpful to you.