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Updating Cornell Holdings in OCLC: A Vision of Cornell and WorldCat in Sync

Jim LeBlanc

Over the past twenty years or so, representation of CUL’s holdings in the OCLC database has grown greatly out of sync with what appears in our local online catalog.  Although we have regularly sent our new catalog records to OCLC, the nature of the vendor’s error reports, plus a lack of resources on our part to wrestle with the often inscrutable nature of these documents and the labor-intensive problem resolution associated with keeping our OCLC data up-to-date, have all contributed to this sloppy state of affairs.

Recently, OCLC has made significant improvements in its error-reporting protocol.  Although its current approach is still not ideal from Cornell’s point of view, Library Technical Services (LTS) staff are now in a position to perform the weekly cleanup associated with our dataloads.  In November we initiated a data reclamation project with OCLC, for which we sent the utility a clean file of our current holdings.  OCLC is using this file to “reclaim” our existing holdings, add records for those Cornell holdings not previously represented in WorldCat, and delete those holdings no longer available at Cornell (for example, holdings for titles that have been withdrawn at some point over the past two decades but were never reported to the utility).  To date, OCLC has reset holdings for some 4.1 million titles in the Cornell collection.  The utility hopes to resolve most of the remaining 400,000 records soon, at which point LTS will begin a project-related cleanup effort on our end: fixing errors that prevented the reload of certain holdings and identifying pockets of eligible records that were overlooked in the reclamation.

The Library hopes to realize several benefits from this project.  Clearly, a more-accurate representation of Cornell holdings in OCLC’s WorldCat database is desirable, in itself, for improved record and resource sharing through that database.  In addition, the Open WorldCat program enables Google and Yahoo users who click on “Find in a Library” links to locate titles in their local libraries.  As the Google Library and Open WorldCat projects gain momentum and functionality, accurate Cornell holdings information will be the key to leading users from materials discovered on the Web to Cornell’s rich collections.  The Library’s shared repository initiative (CATALYST) may also need to rely on the accuracy of Cornell holdings in OCLC for the implementation of this cutting-edge project.  To provide potential borrowers with more-detailed information regarding individual volumes and multiple copies of Cornell titles, LTS hopes to add Cornell’s MARC holdings records, along with the usual bibliographic data, to our weekly OCLC-record export routines at some point later in 2006.

Finally, a bit of trivia.  In the process of loading Cornell’s reclaimed records, CUL had the honor of contributing the 64 millionth record to WorldCat!

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