union lists and holdings format BMACLENN@UVMVM.BITNET 25 Jul 1991 14:43 UTC
I am posting this to serialst and notis-l. Apologies to those who receive duplicates. At the University of Vermont we are currently investigating methods for getting our serials holdings into a union list (we are considering the New England Union List on OCLC). Not so long ago (but long ago enough so that it's no longer current) we abolished our local U. Vermont libraries union list system -- a useful, but archaic, relic of the late '60's. We decided to commit time and resources to maintaining detailed level holdings statements in our NOTIS system and, if necessary, use the NOTIS holdings data to produce a printed list. Recently, several issues have come to surface. Our Interlibrary loan dept. has several concerns about making heavy use of OCLC's union list services while the University Libraries are not doing anything about contributing to such a list (the ethical dilemma). Additionally, since bringing NOTIS up, we have been concentrating on maintaining long, detailed holdings statements in our vol. holdings records. This information is not easily transferred to printed format without significant use of paper! Furthermore, OCLC informs us that it is probably not possible for them to convert this data into summary level statements that would fit into their LDR's (local data records for display of an institution's holdings in the union list). Their tapeloading program apparently will only "read the first occurence of the holdings field" which leads me to believe that an attempted tape conversion would result in partial, incomplete, or inaccurate display of union list holdings. Are other institutions grappling with these issues? I attended several meetings at ALA Atlanta last month and several groups (ALCTS Committee on Union Lists, LITA MARC Holdings Interest Group, OCLC Union List User's Group) were talking about this. It seems there are more questions than answers at this point. Specifically I am wondering: (1) if anyone has written a program to collapse detailed level holdings statements into summary level holdings statements (for displays in union lists); (2) if anyone is successfully tape loading holdings data from a local system (any local system - NOTIS? Geac? CARL? DRA? VTLS, etc.?) into a utility (any utility - OCLC? RLIN? WLN? UTLAS?). Or, are folks who are union listing maintaining 2 holdings files: one for your local online system and one for your union list system? Or are many of you waiting for standards to be fully realized by libraries, vendors, utilities before you even begin to think about union listing? I guess I'm finding small comfort in the notion that our holdings are viewable on the Internet (there are many smaller institutions who have access to the utilities, but aren't quite there yet in terms of accessing the Internet). Anyway, I'd really appreciate some insights into this. We are seriously considering the OCLC union list possibility ... and the notion of re-keying summary level holdings into the union list after putting years of detailed level holdings into our local NOTIS system seems totally absurd, if not regressive. Thanks for any thoughts on these matters. Birdie MacLennan Serials Cataloger Bailey/Howe Library bmaclenn@uvmvm.BITNET University of Vermont bmaclenn@uvmvm.uvm.edu (Internet)