MARCIVE Newsletter
July 2000   Number 37

But what does this mean to a non-depository library—academic or public? Because of the enormous number of sources of government information available on the Web, a library does not have to acquire and, more importantly, maintain the documents. However, it is difficult for the library to seek the addresses for these sites and bookmark them on their homepages and, especially tedious, maintain the addresses.

Even if the homepages are carefully kept up-to-date, a patron who uses the OPAC would not find that information.

But what if you integrated web resources into your OPAC? A patron searches the catalog, expecting to find books and journal articles that pertain to their inquiry. Imagine their delight when they find a catalog record with a URL (uniform resource locator) that provides a "hotlink" to the full-text document on the Web!

Now you can easily provide your users with such access. Through MARCIVE’s Documents Without Shelves service, you can "acquire" government documents—without being a depository—and include them in your local catalog.

MARCIVE has complete MARC records and the tools to customize them for your local system. Every month you receive a file of MARC records ready to load into your catalog. Each record contains the URL (web address) or PURL (permanent address) of the latest government documents, in addition to full cataloging information. As soon as you load these records into your catalog, you are providing access by subject, agency, title, all of the access points of a complete MARC record. And if your catalog has the ability to hotlink to the site, you are providing your patrons with the full text online.

To show you how the records might look in your system, we connected to the WebPAC of one of our ongoing government document data subscribers (see sample screens right).

In this catalog, when a patron does a search on a subject of "Human engineering--United States", she will find a list of the titles of 27 books, microforms, serials, and computer resources with this subject heading.

The sixth title, Ergonomics : real people, real problems, real solutions, looks interesting. Choosing it, she will see the full bibliographic record.

If she then clicks on the URL address, she is taken to the full text of the document.

Even if your library is not a government document depository, you can provide these documents to your patrons.

Simply subscribe to Documents Without Shelves for $1,325 per year.

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From July 8-11, you'll find many of us at McCormick Place in Chicago for the ALA annual conference.

We will not be having a MARCIVE Update meeting at this conference, so to find out what's new or talk about our current services, please drop by our booth #327.

If your questions are complex or if you are trying to coordinate with other librarians on your staff, you may wish to set up a meeting with your MARCIVE representative in advance.

MARCIVE staff participating will be Robert Fleming, Cindy Fleming, Scott Fleming, Kristina Fleming, Janifer Meldrum, Joan Chapa, Rose Marie McElfresh, Jim Noël, Richard Smith, and Carol Love.

Campus librarians from the Education Service Center Region 20: please bring your cataloging and conversion questions to us at this meeting September 8.

The FDC meeting is now being held in the fall. So Joan Chapa, Marketing Representative, and Jim Noël, GPO Services Manager, look forward to meeting with our many depository library customers in person from October 22-25.

We are proud to be a sponsor of this conference being hosted by the Library of Congress November 15-17.

Dates for this conference are set for January 12-17. More details about our plans will be included in the next newsletter.

We look forward to seeing our academic customers at this conference March 15-18.

We hope every Texas librarian will make plans to come to our city March 29-31.

All MARCIVE depository libraries are encouraged to come to our hometown for this meeting April 1-4.

Several new features have been added since our last big announcement, which was the Archival Database Management feature. As many of you know, once you are set up to use that feature, when you search the database, you can see records that you cataloged originally or for which you created special order records. Your titles are interfiled with the Library of Congress records, National Library of Medicine records, etc., that you have always seen. You can use your records in the same way you use any other record as the basis for further orders. In addition, you can select your record and create an archival delete request to indicate that you no longer hold the title. The record will disappear from the MarciveWeb SELECT database and from your own database of previous orders maintained for you here at MARCIVE. Please contact Customer Service to find out more about this feature.

1. Automatically copy call number and price. For those of you who are using the new Archival Database Management feature, a change has been made that affects what happens when you place a Special Order on one of your own records in the database. Now, any call number or price that you used in the record on which you are basing the Special Order will be copied to the appropriate places in your new record. This has previously been the case when you placed a Standard Order based on one of your own records. Now a Special Order will behave in exactly the same way. For either type of order, please make sure that the copied call number and price are correct for the new record and change them if they are not.

2. Identify CIP cataloging before you view the full record. We have added a new piece of data to the list of titles in MarciveWeb SELECT. When the cataloging for a title is designated by the cataloging agency as being preliminary or partial, at a minimal level, or at a prepublication level, this will be indicated by a term in parentheses following the abbreviation for the cataloging agency or source. These correspond to MARC records which have a value of '5', '7', or '8' set for the encoding level in the leader. This will enable you to avoid looking at records cataloged with these levels if you so desire.

For example, you can identify LC's CIP cataloging because it will be marked LC (PrePub).

PrePub. When you see that LC, NLC, or NLM has cataloged a work before it was published, the record will lack paging and some other information. When the work is published, those agencies will usually go back and create a full level cataloging record. We do not display both the PrePub record and the full level cataloging record, unless one of the search points is different (title, author, publisher, or year of publication).

Minimal. When LC catalogs a work at the minimal level, they do not usually go back and upgrade it. What you see is typically the most complete cataloging they plan to do.

3. Sharing a login name. A few of you are trying to share a login account among several individuals. We will now warn you that another individual is using the account.

The rest of you should never see this warning. If, however, you are disconnected from your Internet Service Provider and are assigned a different IP address when you reconnect, you will see this warning. You can safely choose to login anyway since you know there can be no real session active.--JM

Richard Watts, Coordinator of Technical Processing, San Bernardino County Library

Mono County Library had most of its bibliographic records in machine-readable form. The agreement with San Bernardino County Library called for these records to be merged into the SBCL database, with holdings for duplicate titles to be attached to SBCL's records. The SBCL records are under authority control and conform to AACR2 and MARC standards. Many of Mono County's records were from standard sources and could be merged easily.

However, many others had been created by being typed by Mono County staff and volunteers. Non-standard tagging and formatting prevented their being merged cleanly into SBCL's system.

I prepared a Request for Quotation and submitted it to three vendors known for performing such services. One vendor did not respond. A second based its quote on matching on ISBNs for a low price, but then charging much more for manual review of all other records. Since a large percentage of Mono County's records lacked ISBNs, this approach was rejected.

MARCIVE's price quote involved more uniform pricing based on a wide range of search algorithms, with the optional provision of matching authority records being provided at an additional charge. MARCIVE's proposal was chosen.

There were two sets of records in two contiguous sequences in SBCL's database, and they were easily extracted for FTP transmission to MARCIVE. Sample records from the first batch were processed quickly, and MARCIVE agreed to minor changes requested by SBCL based on the first sample without additional charge. The processed bibliographic and accompanying authority records were returned via FTP within a few days, and the final price was very close to that in the bid.

All records were loaded into DRA with minimal problems. MARCIVE provided a printed list of unmatched records which were returned in their original form, and SBCL revised these manually at a later time.

When the second batch of records became available, SBCL decided that MARCIVE would be offered the chance to process them following the same specifications without having to go through the bidding process if they would do so using the same price schedule. MARCIVE agreed to do so, and the process went even more smoothly the second time.

By coincidence, SBCL also contracted with MARCIVE to provide government document services during the same time period, but the two contracts were in no way contingent upon each other. In the latter case, MARCIVE was chosen because of its unique services in this area, after it was suggested during a Federal Documents Depository inspection that the library contract with a company providing such services.--JM

If you are a customer of our Overnight Authorities, Notification Service, or other Authorities Processing services, here are some recent enhancements to our services. The most exciting may be the MARC Record Enrichment Service, which is the subject of a related story on the back cover.

If you obtain listings as part of your Notification Service from MARCIVE, you probably noticed how large they have been since March 2000. Library of Congress is distributing a lot of changes which are important as part of the MARC authority record, but which you may not wish to see in a printout or electronic listing.

If you are the Notification Service contact at your library and have not received an explanation of what options you have for reducing the size of your monthly listing, please send an email to jplaunt@marcive.com.

You can now enrich your MARC records with Table of Contents, Summaries, Annotations, additional Fiction access points such as genre and setting, and additional Biography access points such as hometown.

MARC Record Enrichment Service can be added to your Overnight Authorities profile and the work will be done on your new cataloging overnight. There is an additional cost per record enriched, but as long as the work is done in conjunction with authorities processing, there is no minimum charge.

Table of Contents, per hit $0.50

Fiction enrichment, per hit $0.50

Biography enrichment, per hit $0.50

Summaries or annotations, per hit $0.30

Author notes (with any of the above) No charge

If you wish to add this service, please request a MARC Record Enrichment Service Profile and talk to your representative to determine if a new purchase order is required.

Standards regarding the coding of form subdivisions have changed. Previously a $x was to be used for form as well as general subdivisions; now form subdivisions must be coded as a $v while general subdivisions must remain as $x. MARCIVE processing will change the coding from $x to $v where appropriate.

However the following heading will remain unchanged because the addition of "History and criticism" tells us that the work is not in the form of "Controversial literature", but is a work about "Controversial literature".

You will not have to do anything to have this new processing applied to your data, nor is there any additional charge. However, if you are already receiving Overnight Authorities and do not wish this processing to be applied, please send an email to Denise Thompson at dthompsn@marcive.com. Be sure to include your MARCIVE ID.

A first indicator of 2 is no longer valid in fields 100, 600, 700, and 800. For some time, we have changed the indicator when authorities processing matched a heading in a bib record. Matched headings went out with a 1 in the first indicator, rather than the obsolete value of 2.

We now change all X00 first indicator value 2 to value 1, regardless of whether the heading matched an authority record. You do not have to do anything to have this new processing applied to your data, nor is there any additional charge.

Furthermore, if we do match an LC authority record, we can replace the first indicator value 2 with a 1 in the authority record as well. If you receive Overnight Authorities and want this option (no additional charge), please send an email to Denise Thompson.

During backfile processing, there are a number of global changes that we can make, even if the specific option does not appear on the profile.

One example of this is the normalization of LCCN, ISBN, and ISSN fields to conform to current standards.

If you wish to have this processing applied during your backfile processing, please let us know in writing, as it is not listed on the Authorities Processing Profile. There is no additional charge, but we do need to know in advance of the project.--JM

In the near future we will be changing the stock used to print our SuDoc shipping list labels. Reports of occasional problems with the stock we now use, including separation of the top layer of the label from the lower layer and poor adhesion, led us to look for an alternative. Eventually we decided to try using the same material as that used in our barcode label production, which is more of a plastic than coated paper. We have been using a small amount of this new stock for a few volunteer libraries with good results for the past several weeks. Since no problems have arisen so far we plan to switch to the new stock this summer when our current supply of label stock is used up. There will be an announcement on Marcive_GPO before the switch is made.--JN

Since we get occasional queries about what services we might have to offer state depositories, I recently attended the State Documents Librarians Conference: Eastern States in an attempt to learn more about the challenges facing librarians working with state publications. Since I've had such a long exposure to the federal documents programs, it was very interesting to learn about the variety of situations state documents librarians find themselves in.

The state documents depository programs vary from those somewhat similar to the federal program, with a central agency getting copies of state publications and distributing them to a number of state depository libraries (anywhere from just a couple, like in Massachusetts, to dozens, like in New Jersey) to states with no real program at all. A recurring theme that was the topic of one of the sessions was that the state publications are the REAL fugitive documents, and many ideas were exchanged on how to improve agency compliance with whatever depository rules were in place, as well as how to find out about and obtain copies of state publications.

Bad weather early on caused several attendees to miss the meeting, and bad news on the federal front occupied the attention of the group for part of the meeting. Public Printer Michael DiMario gave a dinner presentation on Thursday evening outlining the serious cutbacks proposed for GPO and other legislative agencies. As a result, part of Friday was spent drafting a resolution expressing concern about GPO's funding.

The conference was sponsored by "A Friend of State Documents Librarians", Auto-Graphics, CIS, COSLINE (the Council of State Library Agencies in the Northeast), MARCIVE, the University of Colorado Libraries, and the host site, the Connecticut State Library. Local arrangements were ably handled by Al Palko of the Connecticut State Library.

Over the years that we have offered our SuDoc shipping list label service, we have provided a monthly set of labels with just the SuDoc stems for the direct mail titles. These labels were always unprofiled until about a year ago. Since the beginning of the current federal fiscal year last October, GPO has been gradually moving these titles from direct mail to being part of the regular depository shipments. As a result, these now are part of the regular shipping list labels, with the exception of a few titles, two of which are loose-leaf.

A recent inquiry on the Marcive_GPO list about whether anyone would mind if we ceased production of these labels turned up no one who wished them to continue, so after the June set of direct mail labels is produced we will not be running any more of them.--JN

When you sign up to have Table of Contents data added to your records as part of MARC Record Enrichment Service, you have several decisions to make. How you fill out the profile will determine what processing is performed and how the data will appear in your online catalog.

Display and indexing. Your local automated system controls how TOC data are displayed and accessed in your OPAC, so it is important to understand your system's capabilities. For example, Innovative Interfaces, Inc., has a display which looks very much like a printed page. Keywords in the TOC data are accessible through the Words index. Other systems display the data as a Contents note. Records can generally be retrieved by Keyword in these systems as well. Ask your local system representative for more information or discuss with another site loading TOC data. You may have to change your loading and indexing parameters.

Format. When we add TOC data to your MARC record, we can format it in one of three ways:

Basic 505 field. As defined in the MARC21 format, all data are placed in the 505 $a.

Enhanced 505 field. As defined in the MARC21 format, data are subfielded in $g, $r, and $t.

Locally defined field, such as 970. This field, used by III sites, is subfielded as follows.

Size limitations. Your local system may have field or record size limitations that are more restrictive than the MARC21 format. If so, we will customize the records for trouble-free loading into your system.

Existing 505 fields. If we encounter a 505 field in the incoming data, do you want us to delete it and replace it with our TOC data? or do you want it to be retained?

Please contact us directly if you have any questions as you prepare your MARC Record Enrichment Service profile.--JM