Let’s Get Technical — (Mostly) Automated Daily Record Management for a Consortial SILS By Lesley Lowery (Program Manager, Technical Services, Orbis Cascade Alliance) <llowery@orbiscascade.org> Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org and Susan J. Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>
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or the past three years, the Orbis Cascade Alliance has taken advantage of their shared ILS and WorldShare Collection Manager to provide automatic updates to bibliographic records in their consortial catalog. The process is largely automatic, but requires a limited amount of daily maintenance to handle exceptional records. Some workflow implications of this process have required the development of policies, best practices, and workflow adaptation for member staff and central staff. Overall, the Alliance has found this update automation to be a low-overhead way of ensuring members have access to the most current record data.
Background The Orbis Cascade Alliance (“the Alliance”) is a consortium of 37 academic libraries located in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Its members represent a wide range of academic institutions, from large research institutions like the University of Washington and the Oregon State University to comprehensives like Western Washington University and Eastern Oregon University, as well as an array of community colleges such as Mount Hood Community College and Chemeketa Community College. Initially, the Alliance was formed to provide a regional network for sharing physical resources. This focus has evolved over time, and members migrated to a shared ILS platform (Ex Libris Alma/Primo) in 2013 to support both resource sharing and broader strategic goals. The Alliance SILS implementation takes the form of 37 local instances or Alma “Institution Zones,” linked to one central instance or Alma “Network Zone.” The Institution Zones contain local bibliographic and inventory records. From there, bibliographic records can be linked to the Network Zone for discoverability and use by other members. Early on in implementation, the Alliance developed a policy that most bibliographic records should be shared with the Network Zone to promote collaborative collection development and metadata management activities. It was also determined during migration that it would be beneficial to have the records in the shared catalog receive automatic updates from OCLC. This would allow members to take advantage of “crowd-sourced” metadata from a quality-controlled database, leading to better discoverability of records. WorldCat also contains controlled authority headings in many records, which reduce some of the need for local authority control work. Additionally, Alliance members were interested in having the shared ILS automatically respond (if possible) to the addition and removal of their title-level WorldCat holdings with the addition and deletion (respectively) of bibliographic records in the Network Zone. This automation was mostly desired in order to keep the shared Network Zone repository free from “childless” bibs not held by any member institution, and
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to provide quick access to bib data for new materials entering the academic market.
Configuration To achieve both regular record updates and the (semi-) automated response to added and deleted holdings, Alliance staff decided to use Worldshare Collection Manager and several scheduled import processes in the Alma Network Zone instance. This ensures that the record updates and record additions/deletions are handled centrally and inherited by members, rather than requiring all 37 members to set up processes locally. In WorldShare Collection Manager, a collection was created to contain the full repository of the Alliance’s member institutions. This was achieved by creating a query collection that searches for any of the member institutions’ 51 holdings symbols. Each day, this collection is configured to deliver files of records to the OCLC FTP server as follows: • New: Records on which the first Alliance member has set holdings. • Updated: Records held by any member that have been changed in WorldCat. • Merged: Records held by any member that have been merged with another record. • Deleted: Records from which the last Alliance member has removed holdings. In the Alliance Network Zone, four distinct import processes, or “profiles,” are configured — one for each of the files outlined above. The profiles harvest the data from the OCLC FTP server and then import the bibliographic records to the Network Zone, matching on the normalized OCLC control number present in existing and incoming records. Incoming records in the “new” file will overlay matching records in the Network Zone, and records without a match are imported. Incoming records in the “updated” and “merged” files also overlay matching records that exist in the Network Zone, but incoming records that do not find a match are rejected. This cuts down on the creation of new “childless bibs” in the Network, which are largely due to inaccurate member holdings in WorldCat. In all three of these import profiles, incoming records that match multiple existing Network Zone records are skipped and must be resolved manually. Incoming records overlay the existing record in the Network Zone according to Alma “merge rules” that can be customized at a very granular level to protect existing field data. For instance, the rule currently in use protects a note field that identifies bound-with constituent titles and non-OCLC vendor ID numbers. As the need arises, additional MARC fields can be added to this “protected list.”
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