[DCRM-L] local data in OCLC

[Will Evans]

I agree with Francis. Unless the note assists in the identification of
manifestation, which would appear in a 500 note anyway, I don’t think item
specific information relative to provenance, condition, etc. would be
helpful. As Francis notes, it only would create more work in terms of
deleting irrelevant notes, and should such notes slip through quality
control (it happens), it could only lead to confusion. I can see one of our
reference librarians storming into my office demanding where to find John
Hancock’s signature in a particular volume, only to find out the note in
our catalog relates to a copy held by AAS.



We are not an IR library, but I rely on those records almost daily to sift
through the dross in OCLC, especially in locating hidden editions, variant
states, etc. I will certainly miss having access to those records!



Best,

Will



*From:* dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] *On
Behalf Of *Allison Jai O'Dell
*Sent:* Sunday, August 30, 2015 12:46 PM
*To:* DCRM Users' Group
*Subject:* Re: [DCRM-L] local data in OCLC



Granted, we're talking about MARC records, so I'm not sure that "proper
data modeling" is a consideration available to this conversation.  :-P



Given the environment that we're in, Francis, I think your two major
concerns are solvable:

1)  If OCLC user interfaces (WorldCat, FirstSearch) displayed the MARC data
"Blah blah blah $5 abc" as "Blah blah blah (ABC Library)"

2)  If you don't want to import other people's local notes, set your import
scripts to strip out anything with a $5 that's not your library.



On the flipside, when you *do* want access to other people's local notes,
they're all in one place.  To me, the $5 is the best way *in MARC* to build
aggregated access to local information.  It's a simple stop-gap solution *for
now*.  Moving forward (post-MARC), we can create proper parent-child
(master-local) relationships.  (And all the more reason to kill MARC
quickly?  MARC has never worked well for rare materials.  This is just one
example.)





Open to counter-arguments,



Allison







On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Lapka, Francis <francis.lapka at yale.edu>
wrote:

I think it would do more harm than good to expand the use of 500 ‡5 and
other non-local note fields for our local data.



>From a practical standpoint – I’ll spare everyone my objections on the
grounds of proper data modeling – my primary objection to using 500 ‡5 in
this context is illustrated by the *Plexus* screenshot in Deborah’s initial
email. In that record, there are three notes concerning the SIU copy that
are presented (in Worldcat.org) as information concerning the
Manifestation. There’s no indication that the information applies to a
single copy. That’s disastrous. Even if OCLC corrected its display to show
that this is item-specific data, do we really trust it to present the
item-specific information in a coherent manner if **multiple** institutions
have recorded local information?



Consider also the impact from the standpoint of cataloging workflow. For as
long as we’re importing records from OCLC to our local catalogs, I’d rather
not have to do more weeding out of local information that doesn’t apply to
my copy. Let’s endeavor to leave Master Records free of copy-specific
information.



Francis
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