One of the biggest bugbears for many years in e-resource management has been what happens when a journal changes title. It should be so simple – a new ISSN, a new identity, a new start.
However fate seems to conspire against those who would like to make an accurate knowledge base and catalogue entries from it, detailing all the e-journals one has access to going back over the years, particularly of importance when archive collections are purchased and print material is withdrawn on the basis that it is now present online.
For one example I would like to look at the law journals database, Hein Online. Content in this database takes the form of a core set of titles, many of which have changed over the years. Let’s look at one particular example. Hein’s Law Journal Library has a title called the ‘New Criminal Law Review’ which started in 2007. Previously it was known as ‘Buffalo Criminal Law Review’ from 1996-2006. Oddly it didn’t start from a new volume but just had a new name but still, a new identity.
To help those who need to access this content, there needs to be two records, one for each title, each with their own set of dates. It is clearly incorrect to describe ‘volume 1 of the New Criminal Law Review, 1996’ as there was no such thing then! (Which begs the question, really, of why there was no resetting of volume numbers, but there wasn’t).
Another example, this time from Taylor and Francis. The journal ‘Remote Sensing Reviews’ ran from 1983-2001, and was then incorporated into ‘International Journal of Remote Sensing’, which itself had run from 1980. This incorporation meant that the volume sequence on the title ‘Remote Sensing Reviews’ finished, and the other title continued without a break. Different identities, again.
One of the issues with title changes relates to how they are treated in commercial knowledge bases, on which we rely to both provide access solutions and generate brief catalogue records. Ideally both examples above would have their own records, entries, and URLs. No matter that sometimes you end at the same place for both titles – the titles are not the same!
Can anyone think of a solution to this hardy perennial?
E-resourceful 