A bibliographic record is created for a journal at the time a subscription is first purchased. Then, an individual item record is created for each new issue of the journal as it comes in. We do not, however, create a new record for each article contained in a journal (see the Journal Resources for IST page for a detailed explanation of how we gain access to and search information about individual journal articles). The vitally important thing to understand about journal records in the CAT however, is that information about the individual articles within each issue of a journal is not captured and recorded in the CAT. This is not unique to Penn State or the CAT, but nearly unbiveral in the library world! Why don't libraries capture and store information about individual articles in the catalog? Because there are just too many of them! Here at the Penn State Libraries, we subscribe to some 25,000 journals. If each contained just 10 new articles per month, that'd mean a quarter of a million new records into the catalog each and every month!

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