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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.