Removing brief level consideration in the NZ OCLC Integration Profile

See Best Practices for Decision Pages and Tags for groups

Legend: not started IN PROGRESS STALLED decided

Recommendation

We recommend disabling the consideration of “brief level” during OCLC Connexion exports into the NZ. There are many occasions where the Alma record is “less brief” than the OCLC copy due to batch updates. However, RM-CMOS feels that if campus catalogers and metadata staff are manually exporting a record from Connexion, it can be assumed that they doing so intentionally and have made a decision to use that copy. They should not have to work around an encoding conflict with Alma to do so.

Background

Alma only allows for a single “brief level rule” to calculate the brevity of records coming into the system during various imports. The current UC rule relies on the encoding level in the record and while RM is considering changes to that rule, it is impossible to draft a rule that accommodates both manual cataloging via Connexion and batch cataloging using import profiles.

M-level records are a particular area of concern. OCLC batch loads often mean that records are assigne encoding level M while they may actually be blank, I, or 7 in Alma. While catalogers may change the encoding level in Connexion to enable the export, not all campus staff work with that data during routine cataloging processes. In addition, the workaround to change the encoding level on the Alma side is less than ideal and doesn’t always work consistently.

Options Considered

Action Log