Action for Libraries
OCLC Union Listing Service Moves
to Local Holdings Maintenance Service in February
By Heather Clark
On February 17, OCLC's Union Listing service will move to a new platform, and the Union List service will no longer be available through
Passport. The new OCLC service, called Local Holdings Maintenance, will go live on February 19 and will be accessed through the
Connexion browser interface. Access to the service requires a cataloging authorization and may be covered under your current subscription.
Contact BCR's Regan Harper (rharper@bcr.org) if you have questions about billing.
Local holdings information reflects actual item level ownership. Typically this data is used for serial publications to communicate which volumes and issues of a particular journal your institution has available. Local holdings information benefits resource sharing initiatives by deflecting requests a borrowing library cannot fill. For example, a request for an article from the 1998 issue of Nature is sent to your library; however, your institution owns only issues from 1999 to the present. If your local holdings are listed, your institution would not receive this request, easing your lending work load and expediting fulfillment for the borrowing library. Local holdings data will also be a part of the OCLC WorldCat Collection Analysis service and can be an asset for your collection management staff.
All local data records previously added through the Union Listing service in Passport will be transferred to the new platform and converted to the MARC 21 Format for Holdings Data (MFHD). MFHD is a developed standard that will more readily allow the transfer of holdings data from one system to another, i.e. from WorldCat to a local catalog and vise versa. OCLC staff are developing new products to replace offline products (SULOP) such as printed serials lists that were previously produced at six-month intervals.
Library staff are encouraged to use this service to assist resource sharing efforts. BCR instructors will be offering face-to-face training after the product's release. See "Local Holdings Maintenance with a Connexion Browser" in the new BCR Workshop Calendar (page 3) and class descriptions online at www.bcr.org/training/workshops/. Please contact Regan Harper (rharper@bcr.org) if you are interested in arranging local training sessions beyond those that are scheduled. This workshop will focus on functionality and only briefly address the MFHD record format. Users who are interested in learning more about the MFHD format can investigate the Library of Congress Web site (www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/echdhome.html) and the article, "OCLC Moving Local Data Records to MFHD National Standard" by Linda Gonzalez on page 1 in this newsletter.