A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 0

OCLC Update

By Rosario Garza

New PromptCat Vendor
Book Wholesalers Inc., a vendor specializing in books and nonprint media for children and young adults, is now an active OCLC PromptCat service vendor. If your library has questions about the OCLC PromptCat service or wishes to subscribe to PromptCat and/or profile Book Wholesalers as your library's vendor of choice, please contact Rosario Garza at BCR or Robin Buser at OCLC.

British Library Control Numbers Conversion Begins
OCLC the week of August 7 will begin converting British Library control numbers to remove them from the MARC record field 010. Field 010 is reserved for Library of Congress control numbers, but OCLC has placed control numbers of a few other libraries in field 010 in the past. The numbers will be removed from field 010 and moved to field 029 and will continue to be present in field 015. This change will result in fewer false matches on LCCN searches.

Later this year, as part of the National Library Control Number Project, 016 fields will be generated for all national library control numbers except the Library of Congress; field 016 will be indexed in the "Standard Number" index that will be implemented when Keyword Searching is reimplemented in WorldCat (OCLC Online Union Catalog) in mid-September.

British Library control numbers are those that look like LCCN's but have an alphabetic prefix gb. An estimated 737,000 records are affected.

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