Libraries spend a fair bit of time making sure that their collection is up to date. A variety of methods are used to achieve this, but they generally involve quite a bit of manual work.

One thing that would greatly aid collection development would be if librarians could be notified of new editions of books currently in their collection.

Is anyone aware of any service / software that offers this functionality?

Presumably it could work by the MARC holdings (entire or subset) of a library being matched against a large bibliographic database (something like WorldCat , Books in Print, Electre etc ).

Broadly speaking, this matching would be some combination:

1)      Title and author matching
2)      ISBN of held item against previous edition field
3)      Edition number (in conjunction with other matches above)

The system would alert you to possible new editions (later in publication year) of your current holdings. The ability to do the same thing with other formats (csv etc) would also be nice.

Of course it would be more probabilistic than exact (with the exception of previous edition matching) due to variations in title, author, cataloguing standards, how editions are specified (3rd versus Third) and so on but it would be a good starting point.  Another nice feature would be to have such a system be able to run manually or at specified periods.

Any comments, suggestions welcome (and offers to build even more so - I know our library would be happy to pay for such a service)

Thanks,

Rob Penfold (Queensland Health) ([log in to unmask])
Floriane Muller (Bibliothèque de l'Université de Genève)
Samantha Lee-Anne Hilton (Queensland Health)


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