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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.
