Culinary Microfilm

935 culinary books from the Schlesinger Library were filmed by Imaging Services sometime in the 1980s. The bibliographic records for these books are a disaster, and Schlesinger holdings are often not represented in OCLC.  The current state of affairs is due to the confluence multiple unintended consequences, and the relative importance of these books (content, age, scarcity, etc.) and limited number lend themselves to a cleanup project. 

A list of all the titles filmed, by main entry and by film number can be found here. There is a box with photocopies of the catalog cards for the culinary microfilm in call number order. The cards have additional annotations, including provenance information.  This box should be retained as it contains information not found elsewhere.

While Harvard had a single record approach to multiple formats for the same content, in many cases there are separate records for the MMF and the book for which it was filmed.  As of September 2014, 61 titles had microfilm holdings, but the 007 seems to be inaccurate in most, esp. bytes 03/11.  The remainder of use copies are noted in the 852 $z of the print, and are not reflected in OCLC. A further problem is that the books were added to the microfilm record which was upgraded to reflect the print, but the print holdings appear as microfilm copies in OCLC. 

A list of all the titles filmed, by main entry and by film number can be found here.

Process

Prior to February 2018, Harvard used a single record approach (single bib record for multiple formats), and clean up was more cumbersome. The results of ad hoc culinary microfilm are in the catalog–ones done prior to Fall/Winter 2017/2017, these will have a single bib record, with at a minimum 3 holding records: MMF holdings, SCH GEN for the microfilm, SCH (usually Vault) for the original.  The following workflow was designed in Aleph/Connexion, though I have tried to generalize the issue given imminent Alma migration. Macros are used in Aleph for some things that may be better served by rules based changes in Alma.

Some filmed books have since been silently replaced by better copies; a 541 should be added for the filmed copy, per the instructions in Replacing/Switching Out Existing SCH Copies.

Sample cul mic holding template:

Completed:

Thoughts for future clean up:

Is there a way to do reporting that can generate batch searching in OCLC?