Written from a cataloging practitioner’s point of view and set against the backdrop of rapid changes in journals publishing, this book examines the changes in cataloging theory and practice that have ensued from the rapid proliferation of electronic journals and aggregator databases. Heinrich states that the book is intended principally for cataloging managers who have the responsibility for developing the cataloging policies and procedures that will define the resources discovery routes that govern how a library’s users will gain access to electronic journals. It is also aimed at cataloging practitioners.

The opening chapter deals with the effect of the Internet on the work of catalogers, starting with the MARC format familiar to most catalogers and charting the development of the basic concepts within MARC that were originally established to describe physical printed works. From this familiar territory, Heinrich moves on to describe emerging metadata schema, including MARCXML, Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and Dublin Core. She helps those new to such concepts to improve their understanding through the use of illustrations, numerous tables, and examples that outline both the data entry elements incorporated in each schema and the public views of different record types taken from online library catalogs and the Internet.

From this basic introduction to the problems that libraries have been facing and the development of new metadata schema, the author goes on to describe the changes made in the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed., Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), and Cooperative Online Serials (CONSER) rules, focusing on the revisions required in each standard to provide bibliographic control for remote electronic resources. Having completed this useful background information, Heinrich starts to address some of the real issues and decisions facing libraries, including the central problems of whether to adopt a user-friendly single cataloging record approach, which keeps all data on both the print and electronic versions of a journal within one catalog record, or to go for the administratively easier separate-records approach. The role of aggregators or electronic journal package providers is discussed at length, and the effect of the ever-changing journals market, with the consequent virtual impossibility of libraries being able to keep up with in-house catalog record creation and maintenance overheads, will be familiar to many journals cataloging practitioners.

As libraries have struggled to keep up with cataloging and record maintenance tasks, a new broad market and increasing demand for commercial MARC services has developed. In examining a variety of vendors’ MARC products, the author discusses many of the dilemmas encountered by libraries when considering acquisitions of such services. Heinrich describes and analyzes the complexities of incorporating commercially produced catalog records into local library databases and offers some practical solutions to many of the most common questions and issues that libraries would face.

In chapter 4 the author brings together all the theoretical and historical strands of the emergence of the Internet, new cataloging rules, and issues, and tries to put them in a practical perspective by describing how all of these issues have been locally addressed at her library at California State University, Northridge. The university library’s step-by-step implementation of a commercial MARC record service is described in an attempt to “help libraries avoid feeling blindfolded during the course of implementation and post implementation maintenance” (127). The information in this section is also backed up with quotations and references from other libraries across North America and Europe, giving readers easy access to journal articles that have addressed many of the key themes of single versus separate online public access catalog records, e-resource cataloging practice, and the effects of e-journal management tools and services on serials cataloging. The book concludes with a look into the future of cataloging generally, citing the “noticeable shift from ‘deep’ quality cataloguing to ‘light’ cataloging” (195) and the move to the supersizing of cataloging as libraries have graduated from single record downloading to bulk ingesting of files with hundreds or thousands of records. New developments such as metasearching or federated searching, the emergence of the Open URL standard, the use of Digital Object Identifier (DOI)–based linking, and open access initiatives are briefly described, continuing the theme of providing basic introductions and descriptions to key themes and developments.

Although from the outset Heinrich states that the book is intended for cataloging practitioners and cataloging managers, she also acknowledges that it may be useful to vendors and commercial suppliers that provide online journal services to libraries. To this list could also be added serials librarians, for whom responsibility for cataloging journals may be a new and daunting responsibility with a minefield of acronyms, issues, and standards that need to be safely crossed, or simply as background for understanding the difficulties faced by their cataloging colleagues in describing and facilitating access to the collections they manage and administer.

Although numerous journal articles have been published addressing many of the issues raised and discussed in the book, this work is unique in its attempt to chart the historical context of developments in this field of librarianship and put them in perspective for those facing the challenges of handling and managing electronic resources today. Heinrich’s book is not only very readable as a complete work but can also be used as a quick reference guide for those wanting to look up specific terms and acronyms or read a case study of an actual implementation of an e-journals cataloging service from an external vendor. The work provides a very useful comprehensive overview of all the issues and developments and as acts as a one-stop shop for those wishing to gain a better understanding of the complexities of current-day serials cataloging.