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Serials Solutions MARC records being removed from Aleph this month
As previously discussed and agreed upon by the Public Services Committee, ERAC, and Cataloging Committee, the CUNY Office of Library Services is removing Serials Solutions MARC records from Aleph. This affects only the discovery of e-journals at the title-level in the CUNY Catalog and CUNY OneSearch. These items will continue to be discoverable via your Serials Solutions e-journal portal/A-Z list (which is linked from various places, including your library website as well as the OneSearch interface).
We will be gradually removing approximately 300K Serials Solutions records each weekend during the month of July. The removal and related background indexing are expected to be complete by early August. If we notice significant impact on performance, we will slow down the removal process, thereby pushing the completion date further into August. If this happens, we will send a follow-up notice via CULIBS.
We are removing these records now, ahead of our migration to Alma, to facilitate the implementation and testing processes of the new library services platform. Title-level e-journal records will be available again via CUNY OneSearch once we are live on Alma.
Activating CUNY Central collections in OCLC WorldShare Collection Manager
We will soon need to use the knowledgebase WorldShare Collection Manager (“WCM”) from OCLC to set our e-resource holdings in WorldCat.
Those of you on ERAC may remember seeing instructions from OLS about using WCM. At that time, CUNY Central’s holdings were in the middle of a batchload migration from Serials Solutions (“SerSol”) to WCM so we couldn’t really recommend which way to set your initial holdings—that is, whether to use the batchload migration method or the manual selection method. OCLC support told us the migration could take 30 to 90 days to complete. It is just a few days shy of the 90-day upper limit and we now feel like we can speak a bit more about both methods and, in fact, recommend manual selection:
- Batchload migration was not always accurate. For example, it chose an Elsevier E-book package to which we do not subscribe and it did not select an Elsevier Journal package. Also, it took far too long and there are still several collections yet to be activated. Even if you activate via batchload migration, you still have to go through your collections to double-check and “edit” them (which is what we’re currently doing). It seems this method is not really a time saver.
- On the other hand, manual selection of your initial holdings will familiarize you in the use of the knowledgebase and as you’ll be using WCM in future to set new holdings, it’s good practice. It took us a few hours to identify about 90% of our collections.
As we did identify most of the Centrally managed e-resources, we’ve created a spreadsheet of collections that you can use when selecting them for your holdings:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f_h8ppWmbOjcJ0TwGVPeyKB50O8x9Rjefvp9EXKubiE/edit?usp=sharing
(You’ll receive a notice via ERAC when the spreadsheet gets updated.)
A few things you might want to keep in mind as you’re selecting collections:
- Often, the number of titles in a SerSol collection and a WCM collection is a little off—there are often variances in knowledgebases as one collection may reflect a title change as one title, and another may present it as two titles.
- Sometimes, the number of titles in a SerSol collection and a WCM collection is a lot off—SerSol collections contain the journals in a collection, WCM collections typically contain all content: journals, videos, monographs, etc.
- There are slight name variances in many cases. Check the spreadsheet to get a sense of what they can look like.
We’ll rely on the ERAC mailing list for communication about WCM, discussions about collections that should be activated, suggestions about local holdings that may be useful to others, etc.
OLS to discontinue SerSol MARC record loading in summer 2019
(Please pardon the duplication. This information is also being shared with the PUBLIC-SERVICES, TECH-SERVICES, and ERAC mailing lists. The Chief Librarians have also been notified.)
The Office of Library Services will discontinue the Serials Solutions (“SerSol”) MARC records service for CUNY in summer 2019.
The SerSol MARC service provides title-level bibliographic records of subscription e-resources for public access. The monthly service sends updates (changes, additions, and deletions) of the holdings, triggered by collection activations in SerSol 360 Core, to the local online catalog (i.e., Aleph) and, subsequently, OCLC. CUNY uses the service to provide title-level access to e-journals via the library’s online public access catalog (“catalog” or “OPAC”) and Primo, and also to display holdings in OCLC WorldCat.
Sending SerSol records to OCLC to sync our holdings has always been a necessary but daunting and flawed process. It involves monthly identification and extraction of records from the Aleph database for submission. Mismatched records occur often and handling the unresolved records reports is extremely time-consuming.
The new library services platform (“LSP”) offers title-level access to e-journals in Primo through its shared metadata repository. Migrating SerSol MARC records to the LSP would result in duplicate records in Primo. Subsequent deduplication of these records has proven very time-consuming and inefficient by other institutions that have preceded us in their migration to the LSP. Therefore, it has become accepted best practice to not migrate SerSol MARC records of e-journals during this process.
Because SerSol MARC records will not be in the new system, there will be no records for CUNY to send to OCLC to attach holdings in WorldCat. In order to continue our status as providers of information to the global community, especially as ILL lenders, CUNY Libraries must maintain their holdings in WorldCat by activating e-resource holdings in OCLC’s WorldShare Collection Manager (“WCM”). OLS is making every effort to help with this transition to a new knowledgebase. We are currently testing a method that may allow for a one-time migration of all SerSol data to WCM.
While OLS works on a year-long OCLC reclamation project (to update and sync the OCLC control number, the primary matchpoint between records in the LSP) for the 24 CUNY campuses, we will temporarily suspend the monthly new holdings syncing process in OCLC in order to successfully bring CUNY’s holdings up to date in WorldCat. This makes it a good time for our cancellation of the SerSol MARC records service as there is no need to extract the new/updated SerSol records from Aleph.
We recommend that CUNY Libraries begin transitioning to using the WCM to manage their OCLC holdings now so that their holdings are accurate in WorldCat come summer 2019, when OLS will cease loading SerSol MARC records into the catalog.
More details will be shared as they become available.
If you have any questions, please contact OLS.
