Artlibraries.net was a cooperative project of ARLIS/UK & Ireland; providing an online union catalogue of serials in member libraries, together with a directory of institutions. Both originated in print products dating back to the early days of ARLIS/UK & Ireland, when it was far more difficult for libraries with complementary needs and resources to find out about and be in touch with each other. These resources served British art librarians and their users well, but today they are largely superseded by other services and the transformation of the information landscape online.
Rather than a detailed directory, the list of member libraries on the ARLIS/UK & Ireland website gives access to their own websites: http://www.arlis.net/periodicals-libraries-sources/list-libraries .
As regards serials, ARLIS/UK & Ireland now recommends that member libraries participate in SUNCAT: the Serials UNion CATalogue for the UK research community. http://www.suncat.ac.uk/
Delivered by EDINA on behalf of JISC, SUNCAT contains information about the serials holdings of over 100 UK and Ireland research libraries. This includes 40 out of 100 former arlis.net contributors (and more than 50% of arlis.net holdings). The complete list of SUNCAT contributing libraries can be found here.
SUNCAT also includes the CONSER database (the Cooperative Online Serials Program of the Program for Cooperative Cataloguing), the ISSN Register and the Directory of Open Access Journals. It is estimated that SUNCAT now contains information on over 90% of serial titles held in the UK, with over seven million records. It is free to join SUNCAT and have your serial holdings included.
Some of the major benefits of joining SUNCAT include:
– Increasing exposure of your serials collection at a national level.
– Enabling your colleagues and users to search your serials collection alongside those of over 100 other libraries.
– Download access to free, quality MARC21 records to update and upgrade your local catalogue.
– Being able to compare your journal collection with over 100 other libraries.
At present, users can limit searching by institution or group of institutions; EDINA also hope in future to be able to offer a group view facility, automatically specifying a group of libraries (such as those who formerly contributed to arlis.net) to limit a search.
For more benefits please see the Benefits & Expectation of Contributing to SUNCAT, linked from this page:
http://www.suncat.ac.uk/librarians/
More information about contributing is available via the SUNCAT blog:
http://suncat.blogs.edina.ac.uk/
Please do not hesitate to contact the SUNCAT team via the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk if you have any queries or would like to discuss your involvement in SUNCAT.
ARLIS Council, June 2016.