Teaching Wild Horses to Sing: Managing the Deluge of Electronic Serials

When the sheer volume of incoming electronic serials threatened to overwhelm us in the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, we embraced the opportunity to examine our entire e-serials management system and options for utilizing services provided by vendors. This resulted in the formation of a collaborative task force composed of people from serials management and cataloging. We describe our process of implementing a vendor supplied service, the ways in which the MARC [machine-readable cataloging] record service changed the way we manage serials cataloging and holdings records for electronic journals, and the way in which some simple scripting in Python helped us overcome some significant obstacles.