By Barbara Coopey, assistant head of Access Services 

Access PA recently completed a catalog reload of our holdings in the Access PA database. More than a decade ago Penn State joined Access Pennsylvania and added our holdings to their database. There were yearly holdings updates until 2008 when at that time Access Pennsylvania no longer was able to process the updates. Since then, the database has been lacking accurate Penn State holdings.

During Fall Semester 2013 Access Pennsylvania did a reload of our holdings and deleted our old records. Thanks to the efforts of Maryam Kutchemeshgi of I-Tech and E-ZBorrow Expert Team members Shane Burris, Barbara Coopey, Amy Miller, Trish Notartomas, Barb Woods, and Fay Youngmark, our holdings records were examined and the size of the files sent to Access PA were reduced to make the reload easier.

This is good news for Pennsylvania K-12 school, public, and special libraries that rely on the Access Pennsylvania database for Penn State’s holdings information. This past year, Interlibrary Loan received a letter accompanying returned Penn State books from a high school teacher. She wrote that her class appreciated being able to request research material from Penn State and that they won an award as a result of the material obtained from Penn State.

As one of four and the only academic Statewide Library Resource Center, Penn State is committed to serving our Pennsylvania residents. One way is through Access Pennsylvania whose catalog displays holdings for all Penn State locations. Since Access PA catalog searches can be limited to regions within Pennsylvania, many regional searches include a Penn State library. Each campus library is a separate library in Access Pennsylvania, so each campus library receives and fulfills requests directly in the Access PA database. Penn State is a lender in Access PA. Penn State users are not directed to the Access PA database for searching and requesting since there is no user-initiated requesting available in the database.