The Periodical Cat Amy Kreitzer College of St. Catherine Library

Design Criteria Must accommodate all titles Must be maintainable Ideally, use existing systems and software Must be accessible from outside the library

The Periodical Cat is… An integrated, alphabetical list of our print and online periodical holdings Created using Microsoft Access 2000 Available on the St. Kate’s website at

Our home page

Overview of Procedures Obtain title lists Edit title lists in MS Excel, then import into MS Access One Access table per database Combine all tables into one large table, then segment into smaller files Output smaller files as HTML

Step 1: Obtain Title lists Data for print titles comes from Serials Department database Data for most electronic titles is downloaded from vendor’s web sites

Step 2: Import title list into Excel Arrange data into 6 fields: Journal_title ISSN Holdings Print_location_and_format Electronic_location Login Manipulate data using find and replace, concatenate, etc.

InfoTrac Expanded Academic title list in Excel

Step 3: Import Excel files into Access In Access, select File  External Data  Import

Table view in MS Access

Table for InfoTrac Expanded Academic ASAP

Design of table for Expanded Academic

Step 4: Merge all tables into one large table Use append queries (or union queries if you’re SQL-savvy) Design of the tables needs to be compatible for this to work

Append Query

Part of large Merged_titles table

Step 5: Segment large table into smaller alphabetical segments Using make table queries

Some of the make table queries used to segment Merged_titles

Design view of one of the make table queries

Part of the table for the alphabetical range A through AE

Step 6: Output smaller files as HTML In Access, select File  Export Use an HTML template file in Access to give uniform design, navigation to HTML pages Upload to library web site

Resulting web page

Updating Procedure Delete old table for each vendor Download new title list Avoid record-by-record editing!

Authentication Feature “How to login” is a link to any special login details: proxy server or username/password

“How to login” leads to this page.

“How to login” info for IDEAL

Protected password page in Lotus Notes for IDEAL

Proxy server instructions

Disadvantages Not yet keyword searchable No subject access Very difficult to standardize procedures Still takes some elbow grease!

Advantages of this solution An integrated list of print and online titles We “touch” the data as little as possible Uses existing software: Excel, Access, DreamWeaver, Lotus Notes Highly customizable Most electronic titles have direct URLs Available outside the library Data can be used for other purposes (SilverPlatter holdings) Approach could be used to create short bibs for inclusion in OPAC (Rochester Institute of Technology)