MARC records December update
13th December, 2007If your institution subscribed to MyiLibrary and / or the Wolters Kluwer e-book collections a while ago you will already be aware that JISC has funded the JISC National E-books Observatory Catalogue Records (NEOCaR) project. NEOCaR is providing a central location for libraries to download all the MARC records for the e-book titles included in the project.
The first stage of NEOCaR was to get the records from MyiLibrary and Wolters Kluwer and validate that they included data in the fields deemed as essential by an expert panel of academic cataloguers. These records were delivered and made available to the MARC record contact through EDINA.
The second stage of NEOCaR was to check other aspects of the Marc records’ compliance with Marc standards, including some semantic checking of content. This process has taken much longer than anticipated due to the poor quality of the data supplied. Many institutions responded to the brief survey that EDINA circulated asking what issues you faced and how you overcame these. I am very grateful for all the responses received as they have helped Hugh Look and the team at Rightscom to identify if there were any issues that they had not identified already with the data.
The latest set of records are almost complete and will be made available either this Friday 14th December or early the following week (you will receive an email alert from EDINA). HOWEVER some of them may be missing e-book ISBNs. Rightscom identified early on that the e-book ISBNs in the records were either not real e-book ISBNs (they were internal identifiers) or the print ISBNs. I have been holding off making the records available without the e-book ISBNs as it is bad practice and a bad exemplar for records not to include them – the expert cataloguers agreed, my project board agreed and JIBS agreed that JISC Collections should not release the records without the e-book ISBNs. After lengthy discussions it has come to the point where the records must be placed into institutional catalogues or it will have an impact on the Deep Log Analysis study starting in January. I have therefore made the decision to release the records even if they are missing e-book ISBNs.
Should the e-book ISBNs become available we will incorporate them into the records and make sure you are informed. Please be assured that JISC Collections and the team at Rightscom are working hard to ensure that all publishers and aggregators understand how important it is that e-book ISBNs are allocated to all e-books and that MARC records are of a high quality.
A full report will be made available in the New Year about the issues that Rightscom identified in their work.
Please visit the EDINA NEOCaRÂ page on Friday 14th December to download the latest set of records. I know it does not leave much time, but please do incorporate these records into your catalogue before January when the deep log analysis study starts.If you have any questions please contact the EDINA helpdesk or edina@ed.ac.uk