SUNCAT How a Researcher might use SUNCAT

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How a Researcher Might Use SUNCAT

Researcher / life-long learner: Ruby

It is nearly December 2009, and Ruby Tregold, part-time lecturer-cum-contract-researcher, perpetual student and life-long learner, is trying to finish that review paper she had agreed to write. She will need additional information on material with which she is familiar but also on the economics of information and other more technical areas in journals with which she is not familiar. Having consulted the A&I databases to which her institution subscribes she has found a number of references of interest. Unfortunately her local library doesn't subscribe to the relevant journals electronically or in print and she doesn't feel confident that she has done enough to discover literature in the journals outside her discipline, especially those published internationally.

Task 1: She spots the SUNCAT button on the library portal; the help side-bar suggests this can be used to find material held in other UK libraries. Once inside SUNCAT, she finds that three key references are in the library of the neighbouring university and two are in a city that she will be visiting next week to attend a seminar. The so-called holdings statements are very odd but she can make out that they should all have the journal volumes she needs, and fortunately there is a link to the web site of that city library that shows opening hours, and how to get there from the railway station. That just leaves that one must-read article, and Ruby decides to order this via the inter-library loan service at her local library.

Task 2: Having used SUNCAT successfully to locate copies of the articles in the journals Ruby knows about using SUNCAT. She is amazed to see that she can also carry out a subject search to discover relevant journals. Amazingly, there are also links from SUNCAT to the latest table of contents for a large number of the journals. The tables of contents confirm which journals are most relevant to her review. Armed with these she returns to her first task to track down where these are located.