Last month we released a pilot downloading facility for SUNCAT Contributing Libraries. The pilot service enables our Contributing Libraries to download a subset of SUNCAT records in MARC format via Z39.50. The records are from CONSER, the Library of Congress Cooperative Online Serials programme.
There are over one million CONSER records available and these are of very high bibliographic quality and are particularly strong in their coverage of current Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) titles. The records are free of charge to SUNCAT Contributing Libraries, enabling them to download records for newly purchased serials or to upgrade their existing serials records.
We are currently unable to offer the entire SUNCAT database of records in MARC format due to IPR restrictions imposed by a commercial supplier on records supplied to our Contributing Libraries. However, the SUNCAT team are investigating methods of filtering out these records so that we can offer a greater proportion of the SUNCAT database for download.
Details of how to set up and configure the Z39.50 connection are available at http://www.suncat.ac.uk/support/z-target-auth.shtml
Please contact the EDINA helpdesk with any comments or queries about the pilot service.