What are captions and patterns?
A caption “is the word, phrase, or abbreviation indicating the bibliographic unit into which a serial or multipart item has been divided by the publisher.” Examples include volume, number, part, year, season, etc. and their abbreviations. A pattern is correlated with the captions to establish publication intervals, number of lower units per higher unit, and relationship of numbering systems (whether the lower unit restarts numbering when the higher unit increments or continues to increment independently). These correlations enable the check-in system to predict the next issue of most titles. In turn, the captions are correlated with the actual enumeration and chronology to display holdings to the user. How do you expect people to use these patterns? If the software were written to do so, vendors could transfer the data from the CONSER bibliographic record to the serial control record as the bibliographic record is loaded into the local system. The data from the caption and pattern fiel
