Setting up publication patterns

Owned by Owen Stephens
May 17, 2024
2 min read

In the Serials management module “Publication patterns” are used to describe how frequently issues for a particular serial are published, on which dates, and how they are numbered or otherwise labelled (e.g. with date information) - known as enumeration and chronology.

A serial record can have one publication pattern with an “Active” status at any one time, but can have multiple publication patterns with non-active statuses (“Deprecated” for ones that are no longer used, and “Draft” for ones being planned or setup for the future). If a publication has an Active publication pattern, and a user adds a new Active publication, the existing publication pattern will be set to “Deprectated” status and no longer used.

Publication patterns consist of:

  • Publication cycle: this records how often issues are published (e.g. each year, each month, each week) and how many are published in that time (e.g. 2 per month, 1 per week), and on what days they are published (e.g. 2 per month on the 1st and 15th of each month)

  • Omission rules: these define when issues are not published even though the publication cycle rules would usually lead to a publication being expected. For example an omission rule such as “not published on the 1st January” might be common for publications such as daily publications, or similarly “not on a Saturday or Sunday” for a publication that is only issued on weekdays)

  • Combination rules: these define when multiple issues are combined into single physical piece. For example when a monthly publication has a combined July & August issue. Note that ‘combination rules’ only need to be used when these combined issues are truly combined issues (separately numbered issues combined into a single physical piece)

  • Labelling: this is where enumeration and chronology for issues is defined and through a Template the rules for generating the display labels for the issue can be defined. A display label might look something like “April 2024 Vol. 30 No. 4”, consisting of the month and year (chronology) and volume and issue number (enumeration)