Karen Coyle wrote:
> What this essentially means is that if you have a Sirsi/Dynix, Ex
> Libris, etc., ILS, your current vendor has to serve up the OCLC number
> consistently so that you can begin to replace them with OCLC. Hmmm.
>
I don't think it's really a vendor-specific thing. If you have an OCLC
number in the fairly standard place in the MARC record, I think any
vendor's software will 'serve it up'.
BUT. That IS a big 'if'.
I'm not sure if even 50% of the records in my own catalog actually have
an OCLC number attached. This will vary a lot between libraries and
their historical practice.
But it's a non-trivial and difficult to automate process to add OCLC
numbers to the literally hundreds of thousands of records that do not
have them attached.
One place where this is especially a problem is with records purchased
from a for-profit vendor -- an _increasingly_ common phenomenon. These
will almost NEVER have an OCLC number attached, because the vendor does
not provide one. In fact, even if the vendor _wanted_ to do the extra
work to attach an OCLC number, they'd probably have to pay OCLC to do
so! Note to OCLC, you are working at cross-purposes.
But there's an important distinction. When I bring this up to
catalogers, they often say "Well, those records CAN'T have an OCLC
number on them, becuase they are NOT OCLC records, it would be a LIE."
Okay, they aren't OCLC records, but they represent the same
"manifestation" as a particular OCLC record. They _could_, at least in
theory, have somewhere in the record an OCLC number recorded NOT
meaning "this is an OCLC record identified by this #", but instead
meaning "this represents the same manifestation as the OCLC record with
this #." It would add a LOT of value to libraries holding these records
if they did have such -- whether or NOT the library holding the record
is an OCLC member, in fact, there are plenty of things you could do wtih
this OCLC number.
If OCLC is smart, and wants to succesfully make Worldcat and Worldcat
Local as ubiquitous as they're trying to -- they've got to work with
for-profit MARC services to get an oclcnum on the (non-OCLC) record
somewhere, indicating not that it's an OCLC record, but that it
represents the same manifestation as that record. It's okay if some of
them are wrong.
Jonathan
>
Received on Thu Apr 23 2009 - 17:39:13 EDT