New MARC Record Source for NHAIS Libraries

 On tomorrow's Governor & Council Agenda is the following item:

"#50    Authorize the Division of Libraries to enter into a contract with Baker & Taylor, LLC, Charlotte, NC in the amount of $146,817 to provide Machine Readable Cataloging records for the New Hampshire Automated Information System.  Effective upon G&C approval through June 30, 2028, with the option to renew for up to two addition three-year terms.  100% Federal Funds"

We have used OCLC as the source of MARC records to support the NHAIS ILL System for longer than I have been at the NH State Library (which is 25+ years). Back in June when our annual OCLC renewal came up we decided it was time to see if there were other options available to us that would allow all of the NHAIS ILL libraries to have direct access to a reliable source of high-quality MARC records and bring down our costs for this service. 

We received two bids, one from OCLC and one from Baker & Taylor.  The offerings were excellent from both organizations. The prices were vastly different and we moved forward with a contract for Baker & Taylor.

Governor and Council are expected to vote on the contract tomorrow, and if it is approved, we will move forward with implementing Z39.50 access to the BTCat database for all of our libraries in the next week or two. We will follow up with a roll-out of a full cataloging interface that any NHAIS ILL library that wishes to use can be set up on at no additional cost to them for the contracted set-up.

We were very impressed with the B&T interface and look forward to bringing a lot of cataloging resources to our libraries this fall.  

We will post an update after the G&C vote on Wednesday.  

If you want to see the RFB we issued you can find it at : 

https://apps.das.nh.gov/bidscontracts/bids.aspx

It is called RFB-DNCR-2025-08 - MARC Record Source for NHAIS and the easiest way to find it is to search for "MARC" in the bid description and status/bid results of "awarded."