 |
 |
Folks, Karen Weaver has argued, as I understand it, that there may be more copies of the 3rd Edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences listed in OCLC than I had found with a search on the title (producing 55 print copies and 26 electronic copies plus a handful of miscellaneous other entries). She said that libraries might view ELIS as a "continuation/series record" and consider the second and third editions as simply continuations of the first editions--thereby hiding the existence of their 3rd edition when one searches on that edition only. So, I decided to take a sample and see what the story actually is, regardless of what could be done in principle. So I started with the 1st edition of ELIS, to see if they had listed later editions within the listing for the first edition. There are two main listings in OCLC for the first edition of ELIS. One has 667 postings and the other has 332. It appears the the first set is for ELIS Ed. 1 listed as a monograph, and the second is for ELIS Ed. 1 listed as a serial. I then took a sample of 25 from both listings by counting every 10th entry in the OCLC listing. I searched only on the front end of the listings, i.e., US entries only, as there may be still more complications with international cataloging rules. (If a link was not hot, I went to the next entry that was. Samples taken as every "nth" item are considered largely random, if not perfectly so.) The more important count is that for the serial entires, as that is where Karen says the 3rd ed. listings might be found. In each sampled case I clicked on the OCLC hot link, which would take me to the library in question, and it would automatically enter a search on the OCLC number, thus bringing up the serial entry for that library for the first edition of ELIS. I then studied these entries to see if there was any evidence of later editions tucked in there. IN NOT ONE OF THE 50 ENTRIES ACROSS BOTH SETS DID I FIND ANY EVIDENCE OF ANY EDITION OTHER THAN THE FIRST EDITION. NO THIRD EDITIONS. I then entered a second search in each library, on "encyclopedia of library and information" in the title field. Because the 3rd edition added an "s" at the end of "science," I left that word out, so I could bring up all editions. In many cases, libraries had the first two editions, and, invariably, those editions were listed separately as separate entries. In the set of 25 items searched on the serials set of 332, two catalogs were unavailable, and three libraries no longer owned the item. Of the remaining 20, 16 showed all volumes owned by the library; only four libraries used the "1968--" technique to imply later volumes without actually listing what was included. In other words, even though posted as serial entries, in most cases the library explicitly showed what volumes they had--and ALL of those volumes were for the first edition only. And in the case of the four that listed only "1968--" two of the libraries also owned the second edition--and listed it as a separate record. All the evidence points to the same result that I found originally--namely that individual editions were individually listed in all libraries that owned ELIS. No built-in continuations for later editions. I suspect that these were entered at all as serials because the original publication of the first edition was volume by volume. It took 15 years for the first A-Z volumes (1-33) to appear. Another 40 volumes appeared as supplements right up to 2003. Marcia -- Marcia J. Bates, Ph.D. Professor Emerita Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science Editor, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd Ed. Department of Information Studies Graduate School of Education and Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520 USA Tel: 310-206-9353 Fax: 310-206-4460 Web: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/