Hi all, The project of which I am proudest is our library's Journals the Library Has list; it does essentially the same sorts of things that SerialsSolutions does, but I developed it right around the same time the SS was getting off the ground in 1998, and managed to stay ahead of them in development for a little while. The especially groovy things about this database are: * easy to maintain: most of the data is harvested by scripts, so it's pretty easy to keep up-to-date * integrates our print holdings -- not with MARC records like we could buy from SS for thousands of dollars, but good enough * it's pretty easy to compare the contents of a potential new full text journal database against the list of what we already have * it is essentially free. living in the fine state of Ohio, and belonging to the OhioLINK consortium, we have access to about 13000 electronic journals even though we're a small (2000 FTE) university. The SerialsSolutions price for managing our volume of data would be more than 10% of my salary, and now that the service is developed, I spend a lot less than 10% of my time maintaining it. Usually less than an hour per month. Plus an hour or so whenever we get a new database requiring a new loader. Once upon a time this was my first real serious Perl project (searching on a flat file database, back when we only had 4000 titles). Now it's all in PHP and MySQL, although the harvesting scripts are mostly still in Perl since the job is largely one of reformatting text data. My current ambition is to build some tools that will help out with cooperative collection development projects. I expect it will involve Z39.50, about which I know nothing. I'll come back to the list with specific questions when they've formed sufficiently that I can ask a meaningful question... joy Ken Ken Irwin [log in to unmask] Reference/Electronic Resources Librarian (937) 327-7594 Thomas Library, Wittenberg University