MULS Blog

We've now scheduled the Fall 2008 training sessions on Local Holdings Maintenance.  Fall is a busy time for many of us, so we want to be sure library staff can plan for MULS training along with their other conferences, etc.  You can see all the currently scheduled training sessions and register online via the MINITEX Training web pages.

We have scheduled the following MULS webinar sessions for this Fall:

Local Holdings Maintenance Part 1    Tuesday, 9/30/08    1:30 - 3:00 PM 

Local Holdings Maintenance Part 2    Tuesday, 10/7/08    1:30 - 3:00 PM

Local Holdings Maintenance Part 3    Tuesday, 10/14/08    1:30 - 3:00 PM

Local Holdings Maintenance Part 1    Monday, 10/20/08    1:00 - 2:30 PM

Local Holdings Maintenance Part 2    Monday, 10/27/08    1:00 - 2:30 PM

Local Holdings Maintenance Part 3    Monday, 11/4/08    1:00 - 2:30 PM

As we did last Spring, we will be allowing libraries in the Wisconsin (WiLS) library network to participate in these sessions; be sure to register early to assure yourself of a spot and please let us know if for any reason you decide to cancel your registration.  Someone else might be waiting for a spot.

Of course, if you would like LHR maintenance training but can't attend one of our scheduled sessions, please contact Dave Linton.  We'll do our best to help make sure you can get the training you need to keep your Local Holdings Records up-to-date.

Posted by linto001 at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the window on the survey has now closed.  We got a good response from over 100 participants, and we want to thank everyone who participated.  We really appreciate getting your views!

We are looking over the results now. And we will, of course, share anything we think is interesting here on the blog.  We may even try to do some follow-up to some of the comments that were added to the survey answers.

If you were not able to participate in the survey, please don't feel shut out.  We welcome your comments and suggestions about MULS services and issues related to Local Holdings at any time.  Add a comment on the blog, send us an e-mail, or give us a call at MINITEX.  We like to hear from you!

Posted by linto001 at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently, the MINITEX MULS unit began collecting information about whether and how Local Holdings information - which always has been at the core of MULS services - gets used by our community of library staff members.  A message was sent out on the MINITEX News list, and to our MULS contact list. 
If you have not had a chance to respond to the survey, we ask you to take a little time to do so.  It should take less than 20 minutes, and the results will be helpful in focusing our efforts on those aspects of Local Holdings that are most useful and important to library staff.  We welcome comments not only from staff who use and maintain Local Holdings information, but from library ILL staff, library directors and others who have an opinion on the utility and value of this information.  Even if you don't use Local Holdings information, we'd like to know that, too.

The survey is available on the Survey Monkey website. You can link via http://tinyurl.com/6e82ue

Note that we have extended the deadline for responses to Tuesday, 8/12.

In addition to the survey, we welcome additional comments or discussion either directly via e-mail to Cec Boone and Dave Linton or here on the MULS blog.

Posted by linto001 at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OCLC has announced a new session of the Local Holdings User Group virtual meeting that was held on February 7th.  

This new session is intended as a make-up for staff at libraries that registered for the 2/7 session but were not able to participate due to the technical difficulties that arose with the audio portion of the meeting.  If you signed up for the original session and were not able to participate, you are welcome to attend this webinar/meeting, which will take place on the afternoon of 3/6.  By now, you should have received information from OCLC regarding this make-up meeting.  If you are among these libraries and have not received information you need, please contact the MINITEX MULS office.

If staff at your library did not sign up for the original February 7th meeting, we still encourage you to participate, but you will need a little more patience.  The new Local Holdings User Group virtual meeting will be recorded, and everyone will be able to listen at their own convenience once the recording is made available. 

 And lastly, we continue to encourage anyone who has questions or wants to share ideas about the issues discussed at the virtual meeting to follow the thread of our discussion entry on the MULS blog.  We'd like to know what you think.

Posted by linto001 at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But that's not the end of the story.

To begin with, OCLC is going to repeat the meeting and create an archived version, so those who didn't get to experience the meeting will have another chance to participate fully.  (Note: Invitations for the repeat session will be limited to those who registered for the first meeting, but the archived  version will be available for everyone's review.)  That's good news, and we'll certainly let folks know when the new session gets scheduled.

But beyond that, we have the ability to share our ideas, questions and answers right here!  And we are really encouraging you to join in.  These blogs can be more than just another venue for MULS to announce workshops or pass on notes to staff at our participating libraries.  They can be a forum where you can participate in discussions of ideas and issues that effect us all.

There's a lot going on right now in the world of Local Holdings, and we'd love to hear your perspective.  Consider responding to one or more of the following questions:

1)  Did you get into the Local Holdings user group webinar on 2/7?  What did you find out? 

2)  Were (or are) there questions you were hoping to have answered by the LHR user group webinar? What questions do you have that were not addressed? 

3)  Was there information that will change the way you do your work, or that helped you see new ways your Local Holdings Records can be useful either to your library internally or to other libraries?

4)  Did the information about batchloading change your ideas about it?  Is your library wanting to make use of batchloading to update holdings in OCLC?  What obstacles have to be overcome for that to happen?

And, of course, if there's a topic you'd like to discuss or a question you need answered, you certainly are encouraged to share it.

Posted by linto001 at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OCLC has created a new Local Holdings Offline Product (LHOP).  For a general discussion of this new product see the blog entry OCLC Local Holdings Offline Product now available.

A Quick Reference guide is available on the OCLC website and covers the order process, how to download the file, and information on how to import the file into Microsoft Office Excel.

Individual libraries can order a file of their own holdings in WorldCat from the OCLC website.  The file will be current up to the day it is run, and you will be notified when the file is ready. 

Once produced, the tab delimited file will be available for download from the Product Services Web and can be imported into a spreadsheet, table or database.  Exact procedures may vary depending on your software package. If your library has more than 20,000 local holdings records, multiple files will be provided with up to 20,000 records in each file. There is no charge for this report. 

All LHOP files will contain the same data elements in a tab-delimited file.  Below is a brief list of the data elements that will be include in the file.

From the bibliographic record:

OCLC Number
Title of Item from the bibliographic record (245 $a)
ISBN/ISSN (020 $a or 022 $a) - the data will be preceded by a label identifying it as either an ISSN or ISBN
Place of Publication (260 $a & $b)
BLvL - code from the Bibliographic Level element in the bibliographic record
Form - Code from the Form of Item element in the bibliographic record
SrTp - Code from the Type of Serials element in the bibliographic record

From the Local Holdings record

LHR Summary - Note: There is only one summary per bibliographic record per institution regardless of the number of LHRs that the library has attached to that record.  If a library has multiple LHRs attached to a single bibliographic record each LHR will appear on a separate row and the summary field will be repeated in each row.

LHR Leader – Note: Each element from the leader will be preceded by label that identifies the item. Data will always appear in the same column for all LHRs in the file.

LHR 007 – Codes from the Physical Description field.
LHR 008 - Codes from the Fixed-Length Data Elements General Information . The complete set of 32 characters from the 008 will be included.

For ease of sorting, in addition to being included in the complete 008 field, the Lending (008/20) & Reproduction (008/21) policy codes and the Date of report (008/26-31) will be broken out into separate columns.

LHR 852 (Location) – The field tag, indicators, and all subfields will be included as they appear in the LHR at the time the data was extracted.  Subfield delimiters will appear as ‘$’

Holdings Information – Fields from the LHR that describe the library’s holdings including Electronic Location (856) and Holdings Data (853-878).  Each field will be in a separate cell and will include the field tag, indicators, and all subfields from the field.  Repeatable fields will appear in separate cells (for example if there are two 863 fields each 863 field will appear in a separate cell within the file). Subfield delimiters will appear as ‘$’ Position of the data will be dependent of the fields that are contained within the LHR.

Posted by linto001 at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many libraries are interested in OCLC Local Holdings – what we used to call ‘MULS holdings’ – but can't make it to ALA's Midwinter or Annual Conference to attend a User Group Meeting.  This year, OCLC has planned a special virtual meeting to bring information directly to staff members whose jobs are affected by Local Holdings data.

Local Holdings User Group virtual meeting

Date: Thursday, February 7, 2008
Time: 1 – 2 p.m. CST
Registration:   http://www.oclc.org/info/localholdings/

Cost:   FREE

Guest speakers will include:

o        Jennifer Kuehn, Ohio State University, who will present her library’s results after taking advantage of Local Holdings Records to set copy/loan bytes for materials in OSU's special collections.

o        Judy Murran, OCLC, who will talk about batch updating of Local Holdings Records

o        Christa Starck, OCLC, who will discuss deflection and the role played by copy/loan bytes in Local Holdings Records

We'll be particularly interested in the discussion of batch updating of Local Holdings Records (LHRs) since a number of libraries in the MINITEX region are interested in exploring this method of updating their LHRs. 

Please contact Dave Linton or Cec Boone in the MINITEX MULS office with any questions you have about the session. 

Posted by linto001 at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have continued to receive requests for offline lists of holdings from MULS libraries throughout our region.  In the past, many libraries have used an offline list as a starting point for updating holdings in MULS/OCLC, since the list helped provide a direct comparison of both the titles and the holdings summary data in OCLC with the libraries own holdings data.  These lists were known in OCLC jargon as "SULOP printouts," (Serials Union List Offline Products).

For a number of reasons - some related to the migration of Union List activity to the Connexion Browser - SULOP products were discontinued at the end of 2005.  OCLC plans to create a new set of products to replace the old SULOP printouts (and other products), which will be more flexible and more useful to libraries. 

Continue reading "Offline MULS lists - an update" »

Posted by linto001 at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some of our MULS participating libraries, summer is an opportunity to catch-up on annual updates to their Local Holdings Records, or to take on weeding projects that might effect their holdings.  Whatever you might be doing with your Local Holdings, we at MINITEX would like to know what you are planning to do and if there is any way we can help.

If your library needs help with updating holdings – getting a list of the current titles in OCLC to work with or perhaps setting up a Constant Data file with a generic holding statement – the MINITEX MULS staff will be glad to assist you.  If you’d like to get your holdings up-to-date, but don’t have the staff time, you could consider using the MULS Updating Service to help your project along.

Or if your staff has the time, but wants some training on working with Local Holdings Records in OCLC Connexion, we would be happy to schedule training sessions during the summer months.  Let us know what you would like to do and what level of training your staff needs  - be it basic training on LHR updating, a refresher on certain topics, or a new look at working with complex holdings.  We are willing to provide the training you need, and will work to schedule it around your summer activities.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact Dave Linton in the MINITEX MULS office. 

Posted by linto001 at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Planning for “Son of SULOP”

In Dec. 2005, OCLC was forced to discontinue production of Serial Union List Offline Products (known as SULOPs, or often just as 'holdings lists') as it prepared for migration of Local Holdings Maintenance to the Connexion browser.  MINITEX/MULS libraries had used SULOPs, which were available as printed lists or electronic files, to check the accuracy of their LHRs and had used them as local or regional finding aids.  OCLC says plans are moving forward for new product options with availability expected "by the end of this calendar year."

The primary options under consideration at this time are electronic files of bibliographic records and the related Local Holdings Records.  OCLC is interested in hearing from library staff with suggestions and requests for SULOP-successor products.  Contact Cecelia or Dave Linton with your questions and suggestions.

Posted by linto001 at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to the MULS Blog. We hope to use this space for regular (and irregular) updates about issues pertinent to MULS, which means the primary focus will be on helping libraries keep their Local Holdings Records up-to-date in OCLC.

Along the way, we’ll no doubt find ourselves touching on other topics, like OCLC Deflection, MARC21 Format for Holdings Data, holdings format standards and other related issues. We’ll also use this space to announce training sessions, point out changes to the website and, occasionally, post answers to some of our common questions.

As always, feel free to contact us with your questions, comments or suggestions about MULS issues or about how we can use this blog to serve our participating libraries.

Posted by linto001 at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the recent stretch of cold temperatures across the region, it would be easy to think that Spring is far away. But as March begins, we know that the sun is fighting its way back, and soon it will be time for the Spring round of MULS training sessions.

Now is the time, as we begin planning, for staff at all our MULS participating libraries to consider their training needs and let us know how we can best help them keep their Local Holdings Records up-to-date.

Continue reading "Planning for MULS training" »

Posted by linto001 at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)