> Oh you really do mean complete like "complete publication run"?  Very few
> of our journal holdings are "complete" in that sense, they are definitely in
> the minority.  We start getting something after issue 1, or stop getting it
> before the last issue. Or stop and then start again.
>
> Is this really unusual?


No, but parsing holding statements for something that just gets cut off
early or which starts late should be easy unless entry is insanely
inconsistent. If staff enter info even close to standard practices, you
still should be able to read a lot of it even when there are breaks. This is
when anal retentive behavior in the tech services dept saves your bacon.

This process will be lossy, but sometimes that's all you can do. Some
situations may be such that there's no reasonable fix that would
significantly improve things. But in that case, it makes sense to move onto
other problems. Otherwise, we wind up all our time futzing with fringe use
cases and people actually get what they need elsewhere.

kyle