Introduction

Background

The Five College Consortium Record Merge Working Group was formed in 2019 to analyze and provide recommendations on the complex issues of merging records for the move to our new library service platform FOLIO. During our work and carrying out these recommendations, this working group proposed shared best practices that affect how bibliographic records are cataloged in a shared library service platform. These cataloging and metadata best practices recommendations aim to ensure that there is a shared understanding of how to create and maintain records in a shared environment, and, local and unique information for resources associated with the correct institution. These practices are based on national standards and best practices. These Guidelines focus first on library formats for bibliographic records, first and foremost MARC 21; in time, additional guidelines could be added for related bibliographic records such as the FOLIO instance record. They have been informed by review and comments from the Five College Consortium community. Lastly, they have been informed by advice and guidance from other working groups in particular the Five College Inventory and Discovery working groups to ensure that information and resources can be identified, discovered, accessed, and fit into the context of both the institutions’ and users’ needs.

Scope

These Five College Consortium Guidelines and Procedures for the Shared Bibliographic Environment are a compilation of recommendations and best practices to ensure consistency of data input and enable uniform modifications of data for indexing and display in current and future discovery tools. They are not intended as a substitute for existing national standards and best practices for metadata creation and maintenance, cataloging /metadata training, or as instructions for how to use the library service platform and/or discovery tools. Prior to the implementation of the Shared Bibliographic Environment, the Five College Consortium maintained independent catalogs using differing local procedures and choices of standards. These differences in data input may continue to exist in the merged library service platform environment due to variations in the pre-existing files or specific needs of an institution that still follow these Guidelines and national standards. These cooperative agreements reached in these guidelines are intended to be followed by Five College Consortium institutions and used during any subsequent data cleanup.

Library of Congress Organization Codes

For metadata that is unique and locally important, these Guidelines and Procedures will rely on the use of the Library of Congress Organization Codes which will allow the association of these metadata to the resource and owning institution. The codes are as follows:

General Rules

Five College Consortium institutions should make every effort to follow these guidelines given the limitations of their individual resources and staffing. These rules are not meant to be inflexible or overly prescriptive. Rather, they offer general guidelines and procedures that still allow for local solutions to specific needs.

Shared Responsibility for Maintenance

Maintenance of the Shared Bibliographic Environment is the responsibility of all the institutions in the Five College Consortium. This includes the creation, editing, downloading from an external cataloging tool, or batch loading of records. Each institution should be mindful that any bibliographic data altered in the catalog may affect the accurate representation of another Five College Consortium institution’s resources and avoid making arbitrary edits. Five College institutions should use caution when editing a shared record to match the resource in hand. Lastly, enhancements that match the resource in hand can be made to bibliographic records when those enhancements benefit all institutions for identification, access, and discovery of the resource.

Maintenance of holdings, item, order, license, agreement, or eHolding records in the shared bibliographic environment is the sole responsibility of the inputting institution. This also applies to local notes in the bibliographic record in source record storage.

Shared Statement on Ethical Cataloging

Libraries and information organizations around the world must continually reevaluate their practices in order to foster inclusion and more accurately describe the people and cultures represented in their collections. The Five Colleges Consortium (5C) acknowledges that libraries are not neutral. The language we use to catalog and describe our materials reflects the biases of dominant culture and marginalizes others.

We seek to consciously edit our records and seek to redress inequities and injustices in the descriptive language and narrative framing of how we contextually describe our materials. Conscious editing is an active, critical awareness of bias, privilege, and power and an ethos of deliberate care used in the assessment, creation, and refinement of the description that facilitates our patrons’ access to, discovery of, and identification of our materials. However, we as librarians are limited by our own biases and backgrounds and may not be able to identify all issues. It is therefore the responsibility of the 5C to solicit feedback from patrons, make clear to patrons how they can provide us feedback, listen and respond to that feedback.

The 5C members recognize that our patrons may encounter items within our collections that contain offensive language, imagery, or other forms of objectionable content. Such materials are part of the historical record and providing access to these materials does not endorse any attitudes, prejudices, or behaviors depicted therein. Further, our patrons may encounter language in our records that describe our materials that is outdated, inappropriate or offensive and should be improved. Standardized vocabularies, such as those managed by the Library of Congress or the Getty Research Institute, may be reviewed and updated to correct blind spots and biases, but in many cases these controlled vocabularies fail to provide us with equitable and inclusive language. The 5C strive to work together towards addressing biases. We recognize that in relying on these vocabularies we often lack authorized terms to accurately capture the experiences of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, artists from non-Western countries and other marginalized groups. Existing terms might use outdated language that we now understand to be harmful. We will seek out opportunities to include alternative language related to specific identities.

We are keeping abreast of ethical cataloging practices within the scholarly community and confronting and rectifying problems in our records as they arise. We commit to maintaining transparency regarding our policies and procedures.

National Cataloging Standards

Institutions contributing newly created or editing bibliographic records in the Shared Bibliographic Environment should follow national standards. By its nature as a merged bibliographic environment of records representing various standards and their transitions, the Shared Bibliographic Environment is already a mixed one consisting of brief or provisional, MARC, pre-AACR2, AACR2, and RDA records with varying levels of fullness and metadata quality. Institutions should make every effort to follow the latest Library of Congress MARC21 standard guidelines, procedures, and policy statements such as the Library of Congress Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements, Music Library Association Best Practices, OLAC Guidelines for Audio/Visual Materials, CONSER guidelines, or OCLC. However, due to variations in training and staffing, institutions are not expected to upgrade every bibliographic record to the fullest level of cataloging. The principle of a shared bibliographic environment is that institutions can and may enhance records to a higher level or newer standard if the capabilities are available for them to do so and the enhancements reflect the resource in hand and apply to all institutions in the Five College Consortium.

General Standards

This list of standards are the most common but do not represent a complete list of standards in use throughout the Five College Consortium.

• Resource Description and Access (latest version)

• Describing Archives: A Content Standard (latest version)

• Library of Congress Classification

• Cutter Classification System

• National Library of Medicine Classification

• National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MESH)

• Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements & Program Standards (BIBCO, NACO, SACO, CONSER)

• Library of Congress Rule Interpretations

• Library of Congress Subject Cataloging

• Library of Congress Subject and Genre/Form Headings

• Getty Vocabularies (AAT, ULAN, CONA, TGN)

• MARC 21 Formats

• OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards

General Guidelines for Bibliographic Records Encoded in MARC 21

Shared Bibliographic Environment Record Creation and Maintenance

The Five College Consortium institutions follow the cooperative principle of sharing bibliographic records. Institutions must search Inventory prior to bringing in new records to ensure that duplicate records are not brought into the Shared Bibliographic Environment. Institutions should add a holdings record to already existing records and if applicable update OCLC Holdings.

Ethical Cataloging & Metadata Practices

Libraries and information organizations around the world must continually reevaluate their practices in order to foster inclusion and more accurately describe the people and cultures represented in their collections. The Five Colleges Consortium (5C) acknowledges that libraries are not neutral. The language we use to catalog and describe our materials reflects the biases of dominant culture and marginalizes others.

We seek to consciously edit our records and seek to redress inequities and injustices in the descriptive language and narrative framing of how we contextually describe our materials. Conscious editing is an active, critical awareness of bias, privilege, and power and an ethos of deliberate care used in the assessment, creation, and refinement of the description that facilitates our patrons’ access to, discovery of, and identification of our materials. However, we as librarians are limited by our own biases and backgrounds and may not be able to identify all issues. It is therefore the responsibility of the 5C to solicit feedback from patrons, make clear to patrons how they can provide us feedback, listen and respond to that feedback.

The 5C members recognize that our patrons may encounter items within our collections that contain offensive language, imagery, or other forms of objectionable content. Such materials are part of the historical record and providing access to these materials does not endorse any attitudes, prejudices, or behaviors depicted therein. Further, our patrons may encounter language in our records that describe our materials that is outdated, inappropriate or offensive and should be improved. Standardized vocabularies, such as those managed by the Library of Congress or the Getty Research Institute, may be reviewed and updated to correct blind spots and biases, but in many cases these controlled vocabularies fail to provide us with equitable and inclusive language. The 5C strive to work together towards addressing biases. We recognize that in relying on these vocabularies we often lack authorized terms to accurately capture the experiences of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, artists from non-Western countries and other marginalized groups. Existing terms might use outdated language that we now understand to be harmful. We will seek out opportunities to include alternative language related to specific identities.

We are keeping abreast of ethical cataloging practices within the scholarly community and confronting and rectifying problems in our records as they arise. We commit to maintaining transparency regarding our policies and procedures.

Choice of Record

Duplicate Records

Duplicate records are discouraged in order to avoid misidentification and confusion on the part of users. Exceptions may occur with batch loading of metadata bibliographic sets for electronic titles, or, decoupled bibliographic records that have holdings and items in the general collection and special collections and/or archives.

Some duplicates may occur and need to be merged or deduped. Examples include:

• A brief record and corresponding full record for the same title

• Multiple copies of the same OCLC record that were not previous merged as part of the Record Merge Project

• Newer OCLC master record and a deleted/obsolete OCLC record. The OCLC number of the deleted/obsolete record, found in the MARC field 035, will match a control number in the newer OCLC master record found in the MARC field 019.

Metadata Record Source

The preferred metadata record source for most materials are cataloging copy from the Library of Congress (MARC field 040 with “DLC”) or the Program for Cooperative Cataloging participants (MARC field 042 with “PCC”). The preferred source for continuing resources are CONSER serial records. GPO records are preferred for U.S. government documents. NLM records are preferred for health sciences library materials.

Fullness of Record

The minimum data element set for the Shared Bibliographic Environment should follow the guidelines for creation of minimal level cataloging according to the latest version of MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data: National Level Full and Minimal Requirements.

All minimal records in the Shared Bibliographic Environment should include the core RDA elements of content, media, and carrier (MARC fields 336, 337, 338).

Adding and Editing Unique Information in a Field with a Subfield 5 or 2

When adding unique information in a subfield 5 or 2, the best practice is to consult the Library of Congress MARC standard for that MARC tag. If there is a need for further examples, OCLC Bibliographic Standards and Formats can be used. These best practices follow the Library of Congress MARC standard because this agency is the official maintainer of the MARC21 standard. These best practices don’t go through every MARC field and provide further details for note, subject access, and added entry fields in the sections below. When adding unique information, the best practice is to ask if that information solely pertains to one and only one institution. If the information is more general in nature, then a subfield 5 and/or 2 is not necessary.

Avoid editing fields with unique information associated with a specific institution followed by a subfield 5 or 2 unless it is your institution. Exceptions can include obvious errors or content that is found to be general to all institutions.

Enhancing Records

One Format Per Record

The best practice approved is a separate record for each format of resource. This means that institutions should not add holdings for different formats of resources to the same bibliographic record. Where such mixed format holdings exist, institutions should make every effort to move their holdings to the appropriate bibliographic record for that resources’ format.

Analysis Practice

Institutions are allowed to select separate records for the different bibliographic aspects of a work. For instance, a monograph may be treated as a single analyzed work under its individual title or added to a multipart monograph record until its collective title depending on the preference of the institution. Both multipart or serial records and analyzed individual title records are allowed to co-exist in the Shared Bibliographic Environment. The best practice approved is to avoid consolidating or de-dupping records with a varying choice of analysis practice.

Reproductions

Reproductions are cataloged on separate records from the originals.

Language of Cataloging

English is the language of cataloging for the Shared Bibliographic Environment.

Parallel Records

Records where the language of cataloging (MARC field 040 subfield b) is other than English (“eng”) should not be added to the Shared Bibliographic Environment. These Best Practices recommend using only records using the language of cataloging of English. If no records are available for English language of cataloging, then an original record should be created.

Romanization and Transliteration

Exporting Bibliographic Records from OCLC to the Shared Bibliographic Environment

Institutions will be adding new or updated bibliographic records from OCLC. Institutions should make every effort to ensure that the bibliographic record exported from OCLC conforms to current standards and best practices. Best practice is to configure your OCLC export preferences for MARC21 with UTF-8 Unicode and exclude the following fields from export.

Format of the OCLC Number

The OCLC number should be formatted as the following: prefix of the (OCoLC) and the number. Best practice is to not use the 1-3 indexing letters such as ocn, on, ocm. Examples include (OCoLC)874748, (OCoLC)182839994. Records migrated from Aleph, our previous integrated library system, will have the 1-3 indexing letter codes removed prior to migrating to our new system.

Note Fields

Introduction

Notes fields (5XX) may be added to the bibliographic record. When those notes pertain to unique information that is associated with a particular institution, the best practice is to use a subfield 5 and the appropriate MARC field that permits that subfield 5. Institutions have discretion to select the appropriate MARC local note field.

Note Fields that Allow a Subfield 5

The MARC21 standard currently allows the use of subfield 5 on the following note fields.

• 500: General Note

• 501: With Note

• 506: Restrictions on Access

• 526: Study Program Information Note

• 533: Reproduction Note

• 538: System Details Note

• 540: Terms Governing Use and Reproduction Note

• 541: Immediate Source of Acquisition Note

• 561: Ownership and Custodial History

• 563: Binding Information

• 583: Action Note

• 584: Accumulation and Frequency of Use Note

• 585: Exhibitions Note

• 588: Source of Description, Etc. Note

MARC Field 590

The best practice is to avoid the use of the MARC field 590. Unique information associated with a specific institution should be encoded in a MARC field that permits a subfield 5.

LC Organization Code and MARC Subfield 5

The subfield 5 should contain the institution’s Library of Congress Organization Code in all capital letters.

Examples

500 _ _ $aIncludes index.

540 _ _ $aIncludes public performance rights$5MU.

Subject Access Fields

Introduction

Subject access points (6XX) may be added to records. When adding unique subject access points that are to be identified with a specific institution’s resource, the best practice is to use a subject access point that allows a subfield 2 with local/[LC Organization Code in lower case]. Institutions have the discretion to select the appropriate MARC subject access field. The best practice is also to use the appropriate second indicator, typically 7, for the subject access field when a subfield 2 is present.

MARC Field 650

The MARC Field 650 permits both a subfield 5 and a subfield 2. The best practice is to use both a subfield 5 and a subfield 2 in this case.

MARC Subfield 2

The subfield 2 should contain local/[LC Organization Code in lower case].

MARC Field 690

The best practice is to avoid the use of the MARC field 690. Unique information associated with a specific institution should be encoded in a MARC field that permits a subfield 2.

Examples

650_ 7 $aWomen writers.$2local/mns.

655 _ 7 $aFinding aids$5MU$2local/mu.

654 _ _ $aRudman Collection$bOppression and resistance$cHolocaust$2local/mu.

657 _ 7$aTheses$x[Program]$xMasters$2local/mu.

655 _7$aNewspapers$zMexico$5MU$2local/mu.

Added Entry Fields

Introduction

Added entry fields (70X-75X) may be added to records. When adding unique added entry fields that are to be identified with a specific institution’s resource, the best practice is to use a subject access point that allows a subfield 2 with local/[LC Organization Code in lower case] and/or a subfield 5 with the LC Organization Code in upper case. Institutions have the discretion to select the appropriate MARC added entry field.

MARC Fields 700, 710, 711, 730

These MARC fields permit both a subfield 5 and subfield 2. Best practice is to use a subfield 5. Examples can be found in Smith’s Archives & Special Collections Guidelines.

MARC Field 720

The MARC Field 720 does not permit either a subfield 5 or a subfield 2. The best practice is to avoid using the MARC field 720 for unique information.

MARC Field 740

The MARC Field 740 only permits the use of a subfield 5. Best practice is to use a subfield 5.

MARC Fields 751, 752, 753, 754

These MARC fields only permit a subfield 2. Best practice is to use only a subfield 2.

MARC Field 793

The best practice is to avoid the use of the MARC field 793 or 79X. Unique information associated with a specific institution should be encoded in a MARC field that permits either a subfield 5 and/or 2.

Examples

710 2 _ $aHoward M. Lebow Collection.$nvolume 1.$5MNS

Series Added Entry Fields

Introduction

Series added entry fields (80X-83X) may be added to records. When adding unique series added entry fields that are to be identified with a specific institution’s resource, the best practice is to use a subject access point that allows a subfield 5 with the LC Organization Code in upper case. Institutions have the discretion to select the appropriate MARC series added entry field.

MARC Field 89X

The best practice is to avoid the use of any 89X variation. Unique information associated with a specific institution should be encoded in a MARC 80X-83X field that permits a subfield 5.

Examples

830 _0 $aEast Asian Film Collection.$5MU

Location, Holdings, Alternative Graphics Etc. Fields

Introduction

Location, Holdings, Alternative Graphics Etc. fields (841-88X) may be added to records. When adding unique information that is to be identified with a specific institution’s resource, the best practice is to use a field that allows a subfield 2 with the term local, slash, and the LC Organization Code in lower case. Currently only one field accepts a subfield 5: 885. Institutions have the discretion to select the appropriate MARC field.

Location, Holdings, Alternative Graphics Etc. Fields that Allow a Subfield 2

The MARC21 standard currently allows the use of subfield 2 on the following note fields.

• 852: Location

• 886: Foreign MARC Information field

• 887: Non-MARC Information field

MARC Field 852

The subfield 2 for the MARC field 852 takes a Classification Schema Code. The best practice is to use one of these codes and not use the $2local/[LC Org code]

Location, Holdings, Alternative Graphics Etc. Fields that Allow a Subfield 5

The MARC21 standard currently allows the use of subfield 5 on the following note fields.

885: Matching Information

MARC Field 89X

The best practice is to avoid the use of any 89X variation. Unique information associated with a specific institution should be encoded in a MARC 80X-83X field that permits a subfield 5.

Examples

867 _7 $8 1 $a v. $i 1989 $j Oct. $2local/mu