On Oct 12, 2012, at 12:09 AM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> In the problem were mine, I'd take the lazy man's approach and not worry
> about it. Few people put in more than a couple hundred citations in any
> publication and fixing abbreviated titles would represent a minuscule
> amount of the total time using a particular resource. Plus, people have
> gotten loose 'n easy with punctuation in recent times so hardly anyone will
> care and the few that do can be dismissed as wackos... ;-)

Well, except, given the source, these are wackos that are paying to keep the lights on, so I'm not sure they can be dismissed so easily.

I'm not sure I have a good answer to your question, but I would almost certainly say that harvesting MARC records is going to be inconsistent, at best (since I'm currently struggling with a similar serials-related problem, although focused more on publisher/imprint names): while JAMA may be the current name, many libraries (and certainly the libraries you'd be harvesting from) likely would have subscribed to it since it was still the Journal of the American Medical Association.  It's highly likely they haven't updated the MARC record.  How are you going to know, when you get conflicting answers from different catalogs, what the 'actual' name is?

I think, if you're willing or able to spend some money, that issn.org *should* know this sort of information.  I think it's at least worth asking them for a trial of their 'portal' (or whatever they call it) to see if it meets your needs.

Any way you go, I, for one, would be interested to hear what works out.

-Ross.