New Serials Holdings Statements

Over the last few months Serials Cataloging has updated over 55,000 holdings statements to bring them into compliance with current standards (MARC 21 Format for Holdings Data, MFHD). As a result you may have noticed some differences in the way holdings display in Chinook.

For example:
1-2,5- 1998-

now displays as:
v.1 (1998)- v.2 (1999),
v.5 (2002)-

In Millennium this displays as:
y 853 3 3 |81|av.|i(year)
h 863 3 0 |81.1|a1-2|i1998-1999|wg
h 863 3 0 |81.2|a5-|i2002-

Bringing our standards into compliance with current standards will allow us to more easily share data with OCLC, RAPID (an interlibrary loan system), and our link resolver (WebBridge). It will also promote a consistent display of holdings, allow us to take advantage of future developments in periodicals check-in, and ease migration to a new system should we need to do so. Staff in Serials Cataloging, Serials Acquisitions, and Government Publications are working to convert the remaining old-style holdings. This work will be ongoing for some time.

Those of you who work in Millennium will notice that the holdings are entered in paired 853 and 863 fields. The 853 contains the captions and pattern for basic volumes. The enumeration and chronology for basic volumes are found in the 863. Holdings entered in this way will look a little strange to those viewing them in the staff mode. Please consult the public display in Chinook should you have questions about what you are viewing and do not alter any of the information in 8XX fields unless you have been trained to do so. Please feel free to contact Paul Moeller should you have concerns or questions.