CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, February 20, 2006 - Serials Solutions and EDINA announced today that they have received funding for their project proposal to the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) Invitation to Tender for the Publisher Metadata and Interoperability Projects II.

The collaborative 8-month project, AIMSS (Automating Ingest of Metadata on Serials Subscriptions), will investigate the transfer of metadata about a library's subscriptions to SUNCAT, the UK national serials catalogue.

Serials Solutions will transmit the metadata using ONIX for Serials (Serials Online Holdings), a format jointly developed by National Information Standards Organisation (NISO) and EDItEUR, the international group coordinating development of the standards infrastructure for electronic commerce in the book and serials industries.

“Keeping holdings data current is a major challenge for a union catalogue and AIMSS will allow EDINA to develop the capacity to accept and process data received in a format likely to be widely used by publishers, agents and aggregators”, said Fred Guy, EDINA 's SUNCAT project manager.

“Serials Solutions possesses unique expertise in providing a comprehensive and accurate knowledgebase, customised for individual libraries,” commented Jane Burke, general manager of Serials Solutions. “The breadth and depth of this metadata is essential for e-resource management and discovery.”

Peter McCracken, MLS, director of electronic content management for Serials Solutions, added, “Using ONIX for Serials to transmit data messages into SUNCAT extends our solution to update and display consistent holdings data within a consortial setting.”

At the conclusion of the project, Serials Solutions and SUNCAT will issue a case study of the project and a report on issues surrounding updating of records using ONIX for Serials. Any proposals for developments to the standard based on testing experience will be submitted to NISO/EDItEUR.

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