AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter 1:1(March 1998)
| Friederike Bertelt, SSELP Coordinator, Heidelberg
The Sinological Serials in European Libraries Project Database (SSELP)
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In 1996 SSELP was set up by the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS) as a project to overcome one of the major obstacles of sinological research: locating Asia-related periodicals not available in one's own library. It is a European project that aims to link dispersed European resources through an OPAC of sinological serial holdings in European libraries that can be kept up-to-date. The project began with a two year-grant of the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation. The basic concept was to collect available databases, develop import routines to make the data compatible, and also to enable institutes with non-automated catalogues to retreive and download records as needed.
Staff is one documentarist responsible for editing and public relations, and two free-lance programmers who do most of the programming work. The library program chosen is ALLEGRO-C, a development by the University of Braunschweig, Germany, combined with the newly developed server program AVANTI on a UNIX platform. To implement and run this combination also proved to be a pilot project and a big part of the energy of the whole team was absorbed by this for quite some time, but the system now runs very satisfactorily.
Meanwhile SSELP contains about 11,000 title entries and local holding statements of 550 institutes, most of them German, that could be integrated into SSELP. The large number of German institutes result from the import of the first effort to create such a database, EDoCS (European Database of Chinese Serials) by members of the State Library in Berlin, that was finally suspended in 1991. In addition to those there are 23 other institutes whose data was imported by SSELP. These two sets of data haven't been fully merged yet due to the fact that two different structures exist that do not match easily. During retrieval some duplication occurs, but the information is clear.
Importing data posed several difficulties. Since there is no fixed set of rules for cataloging Asian language materials in European libraries, home-made records that sometimes don't even follow a national format are not uncommon. Dealing with different formats normally is not a problem as long as there are field tags (sometimes there aren't) and some consistency, but contents can differ significantly. Here another problem strikes at it's worst: word segregation - desgregation which sometimes makes matching impossible should this have been your only matching key. In short, data quality of imported records varied from high quality tagged data to printed copies of card catalogues, with or even without Chinese characters. These difficulties are still with us but in general the situation has improved as we have gained experience. The next tasks to be undertaken are: implementation of an online routine for adding and updating local holdings, development of a mask that allows institutes to insert their local holding statements, and development of a download feature, a routine that might help to homogenize cataloguing.
It is self-evident that even though data retrieval is fully functional, at SSELP men are still at work. I'd be very interested in opinions and happy to take any advice.
Directions for Use (will be also available via "Help" on the "Search" page):
° Use any Interent browser such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera. To view CJK characters please use tools like AsianViewer, Twinbridge, RichWin or UnionWay.
° There are two ways of searching SSELP:
1. Via indexes and 2. Using Boolean Operators
1. Index Search:
-There are 8 different indexes offered, open the "Index" window, click the index you need.
-Enter your search term into the window below.
-Click: "Submit" (or "Reset" in case you want to alter your search term)
-If more than one entry is retrieved, a short title list is displayed. Mark those entries you want and click "Display marked title/s" below.
-Entries are then displayed as a bibliographical record "SSELP Simple Display". Local holding information are attached to the end of each record. Here scrolling the window might be needed.
-If you want to view the tagged records ( i.e. the full bibliographical entries) to get more bibliographical information not displayed in the "SSELP Simple Display" , click "Display tagged records" at the end of the record . Please note: Local holding information are not attached to tagged record displays.
2. Combined Search using Boolean operators "AND" , "OR":
Several combinations are possible: Library + Title, Library + ISSN/ Kanhao, Title + ISSN/Kanhao. (Other search terms will be added here)
°Combine "Library" and one of the fields below:
- Select a country or library name from the "Library" window (Libraries are listed alphabetically according to Country- City-Name, so scrolling might be needed to reach the libraries of "Great Britain" which follows "Germany" etc.)
-Select one of the fields you want to combine the Library's name with, enter your search term.
-Choose the operator you want
-Choose whether you want your search being carried out as truncated (this would also allow you to enter e.g. the first three letters of a title or the first three digits of a number) or exact.
-Click "Submit" (or "Reset" in case you want to alter your search).
-Results will be produced as given above.
°Combine Title/Title string and ISSN:/Kanhao :
If you just want to combine those fields choose "Global Search" in the "Library" window. The rest of the procedure follows as given above.
URL http://asiandoc.lib.ohio-state.edu/v1n1/dbs/sselpinf.html
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