How does the eSerials Holdings service work?
For your library’s electronic serials that have ISSNs, the eSerials Holdings service automates the maintenance of title-level holdings in WorldCat. It does this at no charge if your library is an OCLC member. Here’s how it works. First, you order the service via the OCLC Online Service Center. When you order, you indicate how OCLC will receive a monthly list of the titles and ISSNs of your library’s electronic serials. If your serials management service is one of OCLC’s partners in the eSerials Holdings service, you could specify that OCLC should acquire the list from the partner. Otherwise, you could indicate that your library will provide the list through the OCLC Electronic Data Exchange (EDX) service or that OCLC should harvest (retrieve) the list from your library’s server. For more information about these options, see the Ordering Guide. When OCLC processes your first list, it adds your library’s OCLC symbol to each WorldCat electronic-serial record that matches the title and ISS
After a library orders the service, we contact you to begin the process of receiving their electronic serials holdings data. Once the process begins, we work with you to automatically set and maintain holdings in WorldCat for the library’s electronic serials collection each month, and make a report of that activity available to them on our secure Product Services Web site. This collaboration allows libraries to efficiently contribute their electronic serials collection holdings to WorldCat through you and ensure that these holdings are current and accurate. Here’s a more detailed explanation of how the service works: The OCLC Openly Informatics knowledge base, a 1.2 million-record database of linking metadata for electronic resources, identifies electronic serials records in WorldCat and keeps the list up to date. Each month, the eSerials Holdings service sets holdings against these existing WorldCat records representing electronic serials based on lists received from you.
