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Peter''s picks & pans.

Article Excerpt
I dedicate this month's column to databases that offer information about serial publications. I spent a couple of years of my career dealing with serials automation, including the creation of union catalogs of serials, the design of the PC-based local database system for creating records by national libraries for submission to the International Serials Data System (ISDS), and have used and reviewed most of the major serials directories and serials subsets of CD-ROM catalogs. I know that it is hopeless to create, let alone maintain, a perfect serials database--serials are in constant flux, changing their title, editor, frequency, publisher, subscription price, place of publication, and everything else that can change. From that perspective I chose the promising SFUjake directory and the JournalSeek database as my picks, and the increasingly outdated, neglected, dusty, and rusty PubList directory (which I used to like and recommend in its salad days) as my pan.

the picks

SFUJAKE

The SFUjake directory from Simon Fraser University [http://jake.lib.sfu.ca] is an impressive derivative of the innovative jake database originally developed by librarians at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University as open source software. It is a useful free tool for finding the indexing/abstracting (A/I) and full-text coverage of 25,000+ journals. The underlying database was built by the original developers from title lists collected from publishers, A/I services, and aggregators. SFU developed a new interface and enhanced the original data.

True,...