[Wactclc-alma] OCLC Streamlined Holdings

[Thomas, Kirsti]

Some hopefully helpful notes for colleagues who are participating in OCLC's Streamlined Holdings project…

OCLC says the process takes about 2 weeks.  It's ok to add your institution's holdings symbol to WorldCat records during this time, but OCLC asks that you not delete any holdings while they're working on the project.

I did a test export of our bib records on Friday to get a sense of how long it would take to generate files of our MARC records.  I was pleasantly surprised at how fast things went.

The Seattle College libraries each had between 30,000 - 47,000 bib records with OCLC numbers.  The longest it took any export job to run was 40 minutes.  Most of the export jobs were done within 10 minutes.

To identify bib records to export, I created logical sets of Physical Titles where the OCLC Number (035$a) field was not blank. Because each College has their own OCLC holdings symbol, I also included a search criterion for physical items with a location belonging to a specific College.

I also created a logical set of Physical Titles where the OCLC Number field (035$a) was blank and was surprised to see a bunch of "fully cataloged" bib records that had items in non-Reserve and non-Equipment locations. This is weird because we expect things that aren't Reserves or Equipment to have WorldCat records!

Patricia Naylor, George Babcock, Mary Matney and I took a closer look and discovered these records had an 035$9 field with a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN).  Some of these titles had our holdings attached in WorldCat, some didn't.

I mention this in case you may have a similar issue in your own systems. We're *not* going to include these bib records in the files we send to OCLC, and we'll clean them up manually after OCLC finishes our Streamlined Holdings Project.

To export the bib records, I went into Admin > Manage Jobs and Sets > Run a job.

I selected Export Bibliographic records and then selected the logical set I'd created.

These were the Task Parameters I used:

Physical format: Binary
Output format: MARC21 Bibliographic
Number of records in file: 1 file
Expand routing: leave blank
Export into folder: Institution
FTP configuration: leave blank
Sub-directory: leave blank

Once the job completed, I could get to the file of MARC records here:
Admin > Manage Jobs and Sets > Manage exports

From there I:

  *   Clicked the button with the 3 dots
  *   Selected View Files
  *   Clicked the button with the 3 dots
  *   Selected Download

I was a bit weirded out by how fast the export jobs ran, considering when I did something similar in Voyager prior to our Alma migration, the job took overnight to run.

To verify that the file really did have all the MARC records in it, I:


  *   Opened MARCEdit
  *   Selected MARCEditor
  *   Selected File > Open > selected downloaded file of Alma MARC records
  *   Set the Open File window to look for MARC files (*.mrc)
  *   Waited for the file to load
  *   Selected Reports > Field Count
  *   Waited for the Field Count report to generate
  *   Confirmed that number of records Field 001 was Found in had the same number as the Number of Records Processed in the Export bibliographic records job report in Alma (The 001 field is a mandatory field and can only occur once in any MARC record, so the number of 001 fields = the number of bib records in the file)

Cheers!

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Services Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu





From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu> On Behalf Of Thomas, Kirsti
Sent: Tuesday, February 1, 2022 16:48
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: [Wactclc-alma] OCLC Streamlined Holdings

Got confirmation that the OCLC Streamlined Holdings process will also remove holdings from OCLC records no longer in your local system.

OCLC says: "Once we have set all of the holdings that match in WorldCat, we delete any holdings that weren’t “touched” during the matching and setting holdings process."


It will be ok!

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Services Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>



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