SRU Update and the Dutch Union Catalogue
By Janifer Gatenby, OCLC Leiden Office
In February 2008, the Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus (NCC: the Dutch Union Catalogue)* started updating WorldCat in real time. As Dutch librarians create new bibliographic records and add new holdings to new and existing records in the NCC, WorldCat is simultaneously and automatically updated behind the scenes. Thus, all new data is visible in WorldCat within seconds, even though it is entered via a local interface. Once in WorldCat the data is exposed to a global audience via the freely available site WorldCat.org. The data is also formatted and made available to the major search engines, in particular Google and Yahoo and various other major sites such as Facebook. Many sites, including an increasing number of blog sites have downloaded the WorldCat search box allowing direct searching from their pages. Other sites are accessing WorldCat via their own programs using the WorldCat API (Application Program Interface).
The importance of up to date and comprehensive information in all potential discovery environments cannot be overstated; users may search wherever they choose and librarians can be confident that these users will be able to retrieve the same resources, no matter their point of entry.
Without the
In 5 months of operation of SRU update, the NCC has added to WorldCat more than 1.5 million holdings and 230,000 bibliographic records with a time between appearance in one catalogue and appearance in the other averaging less than 5 seconds. For the first two months, there were two streams of data, ongoing regular work and a gap load of records processed between the initial batch load and the live date for
Following the NCC success, a second release of the software was implemented on 14th July 2008, extending the service to include enhanced security, a mechanism for the deletion of holdings and a validation only routine. The validation only routine serves as a valuable testing tool for both libraries and OCLC developers alike. The service is now ready for further implementations. The second installation will be the Libraries Australia *** service later this year.
The new service has great potential for WorldCat because a growing percentage of contribution to WorldCat is not via WorldCat's online Connexion interface. All systems, of libraries of all types, currently contributing via batch can potentially switch to interactive update. Sending systems need to have
*The NCC contains bibliographic references and the locations of approximately 12 million books and almost 500,000 periodicals in more than 400 libraries in the Netherlands. The NCC was initially loaded to WorldCat in fiscal year 2006.
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***Libraries Australia, coordinated by the National Library of Australia, is used for reference, collection development, cataloguing and interlibrary lending. Libraries Australia contains the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD), which records the location details of over 42 million items held in most Australian academic, research, national, state, public and special libraries. The holdings of Libraries Australia became part of WorldCat in fiscal year 2008.
Hi
I have attended the 'OCLC Data Resources ...' session in IFLA 2008. This was mentioned by Joanna.
It is good to hear OCLC is experimenting this service. It will ease up the batch-loading. I hope to see this can be used by all members soon.
Is there any system requirement in the local system to use such service?
Regards
Henry
SILAS
Singapore
Dear Henry,
Thanks for your comment. I have forwarded your message to the person in charge of SRU Update here at OCLC. She may be able to give you a timeframe for wider implementation of SRU update, beyond OCLC's CBS systems. Karen
Hello Henry,
At OCLC, we will be encouraging use of SRU record update as a means of contribution to WorldCat from local and union catalogues. The system of the contributing catalogue needs to have a SRU record update client which we call the "Pusher". The "Pusher" is capable of generating record inserts, record updates and record deletes as they occur on its own database. It can also process the responses from WorldCat, in particular the responses that include the OCLC number (record identifier) and can then insert these identifiers back into the records in its database.
A SRU record update "pusher" is not difficult to implement, and I am aware of other examples of implementation besides the ones between OCLC and its CBS partners.
While OCLC currently has no development schedule for implementing SRU update this year beyond our work with CBS partners, we are looking into ways to facilitate adoption of SRU record update with other systems in the future. One possibility is to create a service that will poll a catalogue and extract records for update. This is not a complete solution because there would need to be an alternative way of sending identifiers and error diagnostics. Another possibility is a tool set that we could make available.
Meanwhile we are very keen to hear from anyone with an SRU record update "pusher" or project to make one.
Janifer
Dear Karen and Janifer
From the perspective of members, we do have concern about the WorldCat being not able to hold our local data. Many members use Connexion mainly for copy-cataloging. We will do our local customisation at our local systems. This is because many libraries have their local policies different from the international standards. Name authority is one of the examples (especially in Asian countries). Therefore, the SRU Update will make the members' holding info in WorldCat be more synchronized.
Another point I would like to make here is: if the program can insert/update the oclc number assigned back in the local record in the member's database. This is important in order to make the deep-link in worldcat.org to work properly. There are many situations the link back from worldcat.org to the local opac fail.
Thank you.
Regards
Henry Lam
http://www.silas.org.sg