MULS Blog

In the 18 months since Local Holdings Maintenance migrated to the Connexion Browser, there has been a noticeable decline in the amount of LHR updates which are received in the MINITEX MULS office.  We’d like to get a better picture of what factors have led to this change in activity.  More importantly, we want to know whether there are changes we can make that would help our participating libraries keep holdings up-to-date.

Rather than guessing, we’d like to hear from our participating libraries to get a clearer picture of what factors have contributed to the decline we see in the number of Local Holdings Record updates.  If your library participates in the MULS union list, and does not directly update the libraries holdings in OCLC, we’d like to know

1. Does your library maintain a local record (as part of the catalog or separately) of serials holdings?  How is it updated, and how often?
2. Has your library sent updates to the MINITEX MULS office for updating in OCLC?  How recently?  Have you added or deleted titles from your serials collection since then?
3. What are the obstacles or factors that affect your ability to send updates to MULS? Do you see some way (or ways) that the MINITEX MULS unit could help make updating easier?

Remember, all libraries participating in the MULS union list group have committed to keeping their serial holdings information up-to-date. Libraries which have access to OCLC are supposed to receive training so that their staff may input and update their Local Holdings Records (LHRs) at their convenience. Libraries without access to OCLC are expected to send updates to their serial holdings to the MINITEX MULS office, where our staff will make the necessary changes to the libraries’ LHRs.

Over the years, the MINITEX MULS office has accepted updates from participating libraries in a number of formats. We have received e-mail messages, Word documents and spreadsheets. We have had libraries send updates on Holdings Update Forms, both in print and via the web. And, of course, we receive many updates in the form of holdings information printed from local system records.

Whether you have updates to send us or would like to know more about the updating service that MINITEX provides, we’d like to hear from you. Please contact Dave Linton in the MINITEX MULS office with your responses to any – or all – of these questions. We’d like to find out how we can help keep the holdings data in MULS accurate, so it can benefit our entire community.

Dave Linton (e-mail: linto001@umn.edu, phone: 612-624-3360 or 800-462-5348)

Posted by linto001 at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)