Written by Alyssa M. Hernandez
Since we’ve been working remotely, the Cataloging and Metadata Department has had to approach our daily work and projects differently. Although most of us are not physically handling books we have all been focused on projects and data cleanup that preserve valuable information in bibliographic records and which furthermore has prepared us for SILS. One such project is ensuring that locally important information is marked as such in our catalog records so that the consortial Alma system knows that they relate to UCI but not to another campus. This involves cleaning up our local notes and ensuring that they’re in a MARC 590 field that has a ‘flag’ for Alma indicating that the note relates only to the UCI copy of a book.
Prior to our move to the SILS, UCI catalogers placed local notes in a 590 note (defined by MARC as a ‘local note’) with no further clarification that these notes pertain only to UCI. That’s because they lived only in our local catalog; however, as we now share a catalog with our sister campuses around the UCI system, we’ve had to do some cleanup of this information. These notes include information which assists patrons doing research and are helpful to library staff in identifying the specific copy of a book that UCI has.
In completing this cleanup task—ensuring that all of our local notes are marked as local—we made sure that information added by UCI catalogers will live only inside the UCI “Institution Zone” in UC Library Search, and contains information that clearly only applies to UCI. This displays differently depending on where you’re looking at the information: in parts of Alma you will see a little house next to the 590 field; in other places you’ll see that the field is coded as $9 LOCAL; you’ll see the same thing in the record display in UC Library Search; and the patron display shows that this is a local note pertaining to UCI. This will protect the note from being overlayed in Alma and will clarify the display in UC Library Search.
Going forward the Cataloging and Metadata Department will continue to use the 590 notes to highlight information about UCI owned materials and preserve this information as we begin to work with SILS.
Nicole Carpenter says
August 5, 2021 at 3:32 pmThank you Alyssa, and the whole cataloging team for the excellent work in Alma for SILS. I’m encouraged at the transparency of the behind the scenes work described here. Thank you all for sharing, and I hope this continues.
Understandably it would have been a very difficult to discern the value of each note, and rather hide them all as a default. It may just be the example used here, but the note seems innocuous enough to have this information public. Further it may be an important note for the researcher from the other UC’s. Could you display/link to another example?
Alyssa Hernandez says
August 5, 2021 at 4:01 pmHi Nicole. Thank you for your message. Here are a couple of other example of notes that we have included in the 590.
UCI Special Collections copy: laid in is Schaer’s 2004 catalog and two full-color postcards depicting Schaer’s work.
UCI Science Library copy: lacks CD-ROM.
UCI Langson Library copy: purchased by the Carole Creek Bailey Library Endowed Fund.
UCI Langson Library Special Collections and Archives copy inscribed by the author.