Bibliographic catalog records

At Schlesinger we use two cataloging systems to create and update bibliographic catalog records:

• OCLC’s Connexion: the backend for World Cat and FirstSearch. OCLC Is a nationally shared cataloging system used by institutions outside of Harvard.
• Ex Libris’s Alma: the backend for HOLLIS, Harvard’s online public access catalog. It is used by Harvard libraries.

Our previous workflow was to do all new cataloging and updating of existing records in OCLC and export or merge those records into Alma.  Beginning in January 2023, we will do all editing and updating of existing records in Alma. We will continue to create new records in OCLC and bring those records into Alma. 

These new procedures are a result of the OCLC Data Sync project, which reconciled Alma holdings for physical, and locally digitized materials in OCLC.  Please see the Data Sync section on the Harvard wiki for more information.  

Changes made to our Alma records will trigger an automatic update to the companion record in Connexion, which means we can now focus on making updates only in Alma.

Documentation:

This section of the wiki contains several pages of documents to support our work.

If you're creating a brand new record for a new accession, follow these instructions to create a new record in Connexion and new bibliographic and holdings records in Alma. 

If you need to make updates to existing records at the end of processing a collection, or some other necessary revision, use the instructions for Editing an existing bibliographic record in Alma.  Refer to the Schlesinger best practices document if you need more information about a specific field.

If you have additional papers or records that do not have a corresponding record in Connexion (significant accessions of additional papers and records are sometimes described only in Alma/Hollis), see the instructions on our Connexion page. 

For more information on NET holdings, see NET holdings.

If you’d like further instructions on how to make a item record, see Creating and Deleting Item Records in Alma.

We also have QC checklists to assist with proofreading your own or someone else’s new or updated record:

QC Checklist for New Marc Records

QC Checklist for Updated Marc Records after Processing

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