Exit SCAD, March 2001

This week's surprise was the discovery that, as of 1st March, the SCAD database is no longer to be updated. Reform of the Commission and a reorganisation of services have resulted in a splitting up of responsibility for the content of SCAD. The Commission's Press and Communication Service takes over most of the content with the exception of Sector C, articles from periodicals. They will also be responsible for SCADPlus. It is felt however that there is considerable overlap with Eur-Lex which needs to be resolved. How this will be done remains to be seen.

As far as Sector C is concerned, the Commission's Central Library is taking over the indexing of periodical articles and these are being added to the ECLAS database. There is already a degree of overlap between the periodical articles included in SCAD and those appearing in ECLAS. The intention is to add the existing contents of SCAD Sector C to ECLAS in due course, though it is expected that it may take some months to complete the transfer. In the meantime the plan is to create links between the Central Library's home page at http://europa.eu.int/comm/libraries/index.htm and SCAD at http://europa.eu.int/scad/ which will remain available, though not updated, until the exchange of records is effected.

This still begs a few questions however. ECLAS has been until now simply a bibliographic database, without abstracts. A quick check at http://europa.eu.int/eclas/ shows that there are already entries for periodical articles where an abstract is included together with an indication that the data has been transferred from SCAD. This should prove a useful enhancement to ECLAS which has always been much more flexible than SCAD in the way records can be retrieved, displayed and output. It is to be hoped however that Sector D, though only a small part of the SCAD database, will not be lost in the changes. This sector comprises statements from both sides of industry at a European level and is a useful source of this grey literature.

It was not just SCAD searchers however who were surprised to hear the developments. It appears that commercial companies who licence the information from the Commission to create their own subscription-based electronic products had no advance warning. There are a number of CD-ROM and web-based services which use the data and as yet, until the position is clarified, they are unable to notify their customers about what will happen to the subscriptions. ILI, for example, which offers the web-based or CD-ROM source EU Infobase intends to continue offering a service and hopes to be able to draw data from the Press and Commission Service and from ECLAS. Context, which uses SCAD data to produce the CD-ROM European References, is also investigating how to ensure continuity.