items linked to more than one bib. record

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Items linked to more than one bibliographic record

7-13-98

Prior to Fall 1997, the union catalog had not been doing a good job of displaying information for items having content that is described in more than one bibliographic record. We see these in "bound-with's", where more than one bibliographic entity is bound into the same physical volume (such as pamphlets or individual volumes of series bound into the same physical item); older LP phonodiscs where each side had a different work, each cataloged on a separate record; and other situations.

The Release 10 software made improvements to handle items linked to more than one bibliographic record.

"On the Local INNOPAC, a single Item record may be linked to multiple bibliographic records. When these records are transferred to the Central Catalog, Orbis, each of the Central Catalog's copies of these Bibliographic records is linked to an additional Institution record which has an IFIELD (item field, marc tag 949) that contains the record number of the common Item record in the local Catalog.

At Orbis, each of the corresponding Bibliographic records are linked to an Institution record which contains an IFIELD that refers to the common Local item record. Each of the other Orbis bibliographic records linked to the common Local item record will contain an identical IFIELD. All udpates or change of status to the Local Catalog's Item record will be automatically transmitted to all copies of the item on the Central Catalog."

For the information to be stored correctly in the union database, it needs to be read (or re-read) by the new software, to get the new coding. All records coming to Orbis since Release 10 should be alright. The easiest way to fix all records created, or last updated, before Release 10 is to re-send the records from your sites to the central machine.

The Tech representative from each member institution will be contacting Orbis staff (Nancy N.) sometimes in the next few months to schedule a small re-load project. The project would involve the following steps at the local site:

create a Boolean review file of all bibliographic and item records that are "linked", identifying those records using variables that are distinctive at each site. It doesn't hurt to gather all regardless of date (i.e. pre- or post- Release 10).
send the records to Orbis, using the option available on the Additional System Functions menu: SEND a group of records to Orbis

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