Van adjustments around Thanksgiving

With Thanksgiving being next Thursday, I wanted to fill you all in about the upcoming van routes being a little different than usual. So, starting with Tuesday, November 19 we will be covering the North Country route from Concord. Those stops will include:

Twin Mountain, Whitefield, Dalton, Jefferson, Lancaster, Groveton, Stratford, Colebrook, Errol, Berlin Community College, Berlin, Gorham, Randolph, Jackson, Bartlett, North Conway, Conway, Maddison. We will also do this route exactly the same the following week on the 26th.

Also on Tuesday, November 26 we will have the Southwest driver deliver to Springfield and Washington. On the Southeast-B route the driver will deliver to Brookline.

On Wednesday, November 27 the New Hampshire State Prison will receive their delivery.

Also on Wednesday, November 27 the Southwest-A driver will deliver to Marlborough.

The Lakes Region route on Wednesday, November 27 will be as follows: Tuftonboro, Center Sandwich, Tamworth, Chocorua, Freedom, Effingham, Sanbornville, Milton, Farmington, New Durham, Barnstead, Pittsfield, and Concord. This way most of the libraries will receive a delivery.

On Monday, December 2 we will make up some stops from the week before.

On the Lakes Region route we will include Sanbornton and Center Harbor to receive a delivery, either directly or via another library.

Also on Monday, December 2 we will have two different Southwest routes to make up for the Thursday/Friday closing. One route will cover these libraries: Mason, Greenville, New Ipswich, Troy, Sullivan, Hancock, Bennington, Antrim.

The second Southwest route will be: Grafton, Canaan, Enfield, Etna, Lyme, Charlestown, Walpole, Keene, Dublin, Mont Vernon, New Boston, Goffstown.

On Tuesday, December 3 the Southwest driver will deliver to Grantham.

I tried to make these stops as accommodating as possible.

Also, with the holiday season fast approaching I would like everyone to hold off on sending freebies, and donations of any kind from November 20, 2024  through January 6, 2025. The vans only hold so much material, and I want to make  a priority for the ILL’s. So if you can hold off on sending a box or a bag or a suitcase please do so. I have also instructed the drivers not to take items that won’t safely fit in their vans.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Best,
Jill Witham
Van Service Coordinator
New Hampshire State Library

Leader - Type and BLvl

Type of Record (Type) and Bibliographic Level (BLvl) are in bytes 06 and 07 of the leader and the two codes work together to identify the kind of material that is being cataloged.

Before we proceed, let's take a moment to review MARC bibliographic formats. These are essentially defined containers for holding the cataloging details of various kinds of materials. The formats are: Books (BKS), Computer Files (COM), Continuing Resources (CNR), Maps (MAP), Mixed Materials (MIX), Scores (SCO), Sound Recordings (REC), and Visual Materials (VIS). All MARC bibliographic records are one of these formats.

Type is the "code used to define the characteristics and components of the record. It is used to differentiate records created for various types of content and material and to determine the appropriateness and validity of certain data elements in the record." For example, if the item being cataloged is a musical sound recording the type code will be "j." If it is language material (think written words) the type code will be "a." There are 15 different type codes defined. For each of the bibliographic formats there are specific type codes that may be used. For example, you can only use type "e" (cartographic material) in a MAP format record. 

BLvl is the "code indicating the bibliographic level of the record, i.e., mode of issuance, relationship of component part, etc." There are 7 defined values for BLvl. Only some of them are appropriate to use with particular Type codes and the combination of Type and BLvl defines what sort of thing is being cataloged.  

Here is the example leader we have been looking at this month:

 02595cam_a2200469_a_4500

The Type code is "a" (language material) and the Blvl is "m" (monograph). This makes perfect sense as this is the leader from the record for the book Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life.

BF&S includes a table which outlines the relationship between formats and allowed Type and BLvl combinations. In addition to the basic table, there is also a list of special cases, such as theses and dissertations, where the coding may not be immediately apparent to the cataloger and guidance is offered.

NC van adjustments this month

I wanted to let you know that your normal North Country driver will be on vacation from November 18 – November 29. We will be covering her routes from Concord, and consolidating them too.

Monday’s route will run as usual; be patient with the drivers, they will probably be later than usual.
On Tuesdays, we will be combining the Thursday route with the Tuesday route. On Wednesdays, Chocorua will receive a delivery.
There will be no Thursday or Friday deliveries in the North Country.
Everyone will receive only one delivery per week for the next two weeks.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me or Mindy Atwood.

Sincerely,
Jill Witham
Van Service Coordinator
New Hampshire State Library

Approved - Send vs. Rebuild Lender List

From the NHAIS Help Desk mailbox:

When an item goes to Retry what is the difference between just choosing from the drop down Approve-send, and rebuilding the lender list?

Approved – Send will use the same lender list that was originally created for the request except that locations that gave a hard no (reason/condition [Unfilled]) are omitted. Note that Will Not Supply without any reason/condition specified is a hard no.

Rebuild Lender List creates a new lender list afresh. Among other things, that means any libraries that previously didn’t have a holding but now do would be added to the list, any locations that no longer have a copy would be omitted, and even libraries previously giving a hard no will be added to the lender list for another try.

As always, please don't use Rebuild Lender List for multi-copy requests.

 

Brief ILL outage Tue 11/12 10pm

The NHAIS ILL System will be offline briefly tonight (Tuesday, Nov. 12) starting at 10 o'clock to install software updates. All of the changes involve behind-the-scenes functions except that "NHAIS" will be added to the start of library names listed in the new beta report of Net Activity.

Leader - The Easy Stuff First

Last week I covered the basics of the leader. This week I am going to talk about four very straightforward elements of the leader .

05 Record Status (Rec Stat)

This information is system-supplied and cannot be edited. It relates to the encoding level status of the record. In the example below this value is "c" which indicates a record that has been corrected or revised since it was first added to WorldCat.

08 Type of Control (Ctrl)

If this position contains an "a" it means that the material is described according to archival descriptive rules, focusing on the contextual relationships between items and on their provenance rather than on bibliographic detail. Otherwise it will be blank, as it is in the example below.

17 Encoding Level (Elvl)

This code in this position indicates the fullness of the bibliographic information included in the record. In records created since 2020 this is most often either a blank (for a complete record); a 7 for a minimal level record; or an 8 for a CIP/prepub record. Other values are allowed, and prior to 2020 there were restrictions on what libraries could use which codes, but blank (as in our example) or 7 are the most common values you will find. 

18 Descriptive Cataloging Form (Desc)

The code in this position indicates what form of descriptive cataloging was used to create the record and whether or not the standard punctuation for that form was included. A value of "a" indicates that the record was created based on AACR2 (as our example was). Standard practice is to use code "i" or "c" for RDA records (with or without including punctuation, respectively).

 

 02595cam_a2200469_a_4500

Veterans Day holiday

As was done on Independence Day and Labor Day, we are setting all locations in the NHAIS ILL System to be on vacation for Veterans Day on Monday, Nov. 11. The goal is to allow an extra day for potential lenders to respond to requests. Users can still create new requests and respond to existing requests on the holiday.

As previously noted, the State Library will be closed on Veterans Day and there will be no van service Monday.

No vans on Veterans Day

The New Hampshire State Library will be closed on Monday, November 11, 2024 in observation of Veteran’s Day. Which means no van service that day.

Best,
Jill Witham
Van Service Coordinator
New Hampshire State Library

Following the Leader

In the first post of this series I included this definition:

Leader. The part of a MARC record that contains data elements that primarily provide information for the processing of the record. The data elements contain numbers or coded values and are identified by relative character position. The Leader is fixed in length at 24 character positions and is the first field of a MARC record.

Over the next several weeks I will be discussing various pieces of the leader and how they function. 

All MARC bibliographic records have a leader. If you use OCLC's cataloging interface you may be familiar with the term "fixed field." The OCLC fixed field includes the 24 bytes of the leader as well as some other stuff and presents it (by default) as a labelled set of data.

There are 24 character positions (referred to as bytes) in the leader and they are identified by numbers from 00 to 23. 

If you are not a computer then there are 17 out of the 24 bytes that you won't need to know anything about and should not mess with. 

 For those of you who like to know extra stuff, this is what is in those positions:

An example of a leader with the bytes I am about to describe displayed in different colors:

02595cam_a2200469_a_4500

I will be using this same leader as an example in future posts and will tell you later on what record it came from.

00-04 Logical Record Length: a five-character number (with leading zeros for shorter numbers) equal to the length of the entire record, including these 5 digits and the record terminator. (Red in the example)

09 Character Coding Scheme: Identifies the character coding scheme used in the record. MARC-8 is indicated by a blank and Unicode is indicated by "a". (Aqua in the example)

10 Indicator Count: This is always 2 and indicates the number of character positions used for indicators in a variable data field. (Tan in the example)

11 Subfield Code Count: This is always 2 and indicates the number of character positions used for each subfield code in a variable data field. (Bright green in the example)

12-16 Base Address of Data: a five-character number (with leading zeros for shorter numbers) that indicates the first character position of the first variable control field in a record. (Fuchsia in the example)

These positions as a group are the "Entry Map" (blue in the example) and tell the computer things about the Directory portion of the record:

20 Length of the Length-of-Field Portion: This is always 4 and is the number of characters in the length-of-field portion of a Directory entry

21 Length of the Starting-Character-Position Portion: This is always 5 and is the number of characters in the starting-character-position portion of a Directory entry

22 Length of the implementation-defined portion: This is always 0 and is the number of characters in the implementation-defined portion of a Directory entry. Note that OCLC uses this byte for the Transaction Type Code in Hexadecimal. 

23 Undefined: This is always 0.