Full MARC records for e-journals Kira Haimovsky 25 May 2004 15:16 UTC
Hi, Last week I asked to share experiences in implementing full MARC records into OPAC. Many sent me e-mails asking to summarize the responses, but I only received one off list which I simply will copy below. Obvously there is a lot of interest out there in this topic and any additional advice would be appreciated, please send it to the list. Thanks Kira Haimovsky Head, Serials & Electronic Resources Dept. Fordham University Library 441 E. Fordham Rd. Bronx, NY 10458 tel: 718-817-3534 fax: 718-817-3530 haimovsky@fordham.edu We began using SerialSolutions MARC records 3 months ago. We had been loading vendor MARC or title record files for the ejournals in Infotrac, Ebschost, Proquest, and Lexis/Nexis Academic Universe. In other words we had a separate bibliographic record for any title for each service we received the title from (eg. 5 separate records for ABA banking journal). We are using SerialsSolutions to deal with these aggregators now. There is no way we would be able to handle these aggregator titles with the staff we have otherwise. Anyway, when we did our initial load we did not remove the existing records from the catalog until we were sure everything was OK with the SS records (it was). Since we already had so much duplication, it didn't make that much difference and we didn't lose any access during the process. Once the SS records were in the catalog we deleted the individual vendor records in batch. Our catalog is much cleaner now. We are an Innovative site. Innovative's batch loading processes are fairly primitive. The loaders cannot handle the housekeeping byte in the leader that indicates whether the incoming record is a new record, a changed record, or a delete record. SerialsSolutions delete records are full records (not bare transactions records like some). All the records load. We update monthly. The new records load fine, the change records match on 001 and overlay the existing records, and the delete records match on 001 and overlay the existing records. We asked SS to include a 910 so we could identify those delete records easily after loading and delete them, which we do. The monthly updates are not that large, so all of this goes pretty fast. We are happy with the records and we have a lot better control of the aggregator titles than we had before. (We could only update our files once a semester so we were always out of date) Hope this helps and is coherent. Judy Hathway Head of Technical Services University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Blvd Charlotte, NC 28223-0001 Phone: 704-687-3476 email: jahathwa@email.uncc.edu Fax: 704-687-2322 -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Kira Haimovsky Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 12:23 PM To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: [SERIALST] Full Marc Records for e-journals We are considering to subscribe to the Full MARC Records service from SerialsSolutions (or maybe from EbscoHost, their Marc Records are much less expensive). I am looking for comments from librarians that already implemented this product (especially if they have Sirsi library system). How did you prepare for it? Did you clean-up your OPAC before or after the initial download (if you previously cataloged e-journals using print records with 856)? Was it a messy process all together? How are monthly updates handled, is it a lot of work? Is there something you wish you have done differently had you known more about the process in advance? Any do and don't tips? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Kira Haimovsky Head, Serials & Electronic Resources Dept. Fordham University Library 441 E. Fordham Rd. Bronx, NY 10458 tel: 718-817-3534 fax: 718-817-3530 haimovsky@fordham.edu