"Publication date" for periodicals and monographic serials in the catalog

Since I've been asked about this a few times now, I thought I'd write something up real quick about how "Publication date" is displayed in the library's catalog for periodicals and monographic serials.

(Monographic serials are book sets where new volumes are continuously published, a lot like periodicals.)

Sometimes you'll see discrepancies between the publication date listed in the results list and the publication date when you click into the record. For example, here are John Tarleton Quarterly and AWI Quarterly as they currently display in our results list. You'll notice that both say they were published in 2018.

When you click the titles for the Full Display, you'll get this:

As you can see, this information is different. During our Enterprise setup, there was a choice between having our Brief Display either display the very first year a periodical or monographic serial started being published (1903 for John Tarleton Quarterly or 1992 for AWI Quarterly) or display the last possible year the periodical or monographic serial might have been published. We went with the second option. Since there's no ending date for either of these publications, the current year is displayed as the publication year. Next year, both of these titles will have 2019 in their brief displays rather than 2018.

If you want to know when something was really published, you have to click title for the full display and possibly even look at the particular volume/issue you're interested in. The "Publication Info" part (first red box in the Full Display images) will give you the general publication info for the entire work, whether we own all of those volumes/issues or not. The Holdings section (second red box in the Full Display images) will give you information specific to what the library actually owns.

In the John Tarleton Quarterly example, since the only volume we own is volume 1, number 1, we can assume that the library's copy is published in 1903. If we owned other volumes, you'd have to look at the physical copies to figure out when each issue was published since in this instance our call numbers don't include the publication year. In the AWI Quarterly example, you'd have to find the particular issue you're interested in to know when it was published.

I hope this clears things up a little!