Is the term ‘serials’ relevant any longer? Some thoughts on the matter…

What’s in a name? In the past decade or more, there has been a decided shift in the way publications that historically have been known as serials are presented, managed, and accessed. Concurrently, the term ‘serial’ is less often used, whether in job titles, workflows, or even in cataloguing environments. Is the term ‘serial’ becoming obsolete because the publication format is fading or morphing or because, although in reality serials still exist, the term is simply out of fashion? The word ‘serial’ as a noun has definite historic roots. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)’s earliest example of ‘serial’ used as a noun for ‘journal’ dates from 1834: ‘Bristol Mercury 8 Nov. The number for November of the third division of this serial is entirely devoted to the article [on] birds’. A citation from 1852 is even closer to recent library usage: ‘Jrnl. Psychol. Med. & Mental Pathol. 5 461 The “Annales Medico-Psychologiques”, the “Annales d’Hygiene Publique et de Médecine Legale”, and other scientific serials.’ The most recent citation dates from a 1981 article in American Libraries: ‘May 262/3 Duties: all original cataloging of monographs, serials, and non-book materials’ (OED, n.d.). The term ‘serial’ has been most commonly used during at least the past several decades as the broadest library term that encompasses publications that continue over time and are published in successive volumes or issues with no predetermined conclusion. This umbrella term covers a range of specific types of serials such as journals, magazines, newspapers, and annual reports but also blogs, zines, and other online forms. Another broad term, not as limited to libraries, is ‘periodical’, which usually denotes serials such as journals and magazines, although ‘periodical’ and ‘serial’ are often used interchangeably in less technical situations. In this article, ‘serial’ is used in its broadest library meaning. The online environment has also given rise to other types of publications that exhibit seriality – they persist in adding new content over time – but avoid discrete issues in favour of seamlessly integrating new material into the whole. This pattern even exists in the print world in the form of loose-leaf services but is more common online in the form of databases and web sites. The collective cataloguing term for publications that exhibit seriality