ABSTRACT
Reports of the death of the online catalog, while occurring with everincreasing frequency and urgency, have been greatly exaggerated. Although there have always been problems in finding and interpreting serial records in the catalog, these problems have undoubtedly gotten worse in the past ten years as we have experimented with various ways of promoting remote electronic publications through our Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs). This chapter will explore the present nature of the catalog, criticisms of its underlying structure and contents, add-ons and spin-offs that seek to redress some of its shortcomings, and specific problems for serial retrieval in a tool dominated by monographs. A review of the catalogs of thirty top-ranked members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) reveals the diversity of approaches that exist in the marketplace. It also shows that, while the majority of libraries now provide finding aids outside of the catalog-principally A-Z lists of e-journals and databases-the catalog continues to play a key role in the identification of a library’s serial resources, both print and electronic.
