From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, March 9, 1998
Library begins to create unified catalog
By Justin Harmon
The library has begun the process of creating a unified database of its holdings. Using $4 million in special funding identified by the provost, Princeton has contracted with OCLC, a nonprofit membership organization that provides online services to libraries, to create new records for 1.5 million titles not represented in the current Online Catalog. (Most of these are currently accessible as digital images in the Electronic Card Catalog.)
OCLC will add to these records "shelf-list" information on actual holdings (numbers of volumes, locations) currently maintained on cards in drawers in Firestone. These new records will then be merged with the 1.3 million existing records in the Online Catalog.
"Princeton University requires modern information tools," said Provost Jeremiah Ostriker. "The proposal that we create a unified catalog had the enthusiastic support of the faculty Committee on Computing and the Library, and we were delighted that funding could be found."
Database of 36 million
OCLC is matching the shelf-list cards with records already in the Online Catalog. For those with no match, a record is drawn from OCLC's own database of 36 million, culled from libraries around the world. For entries with full existing records, holding information is verified or edited. For those with existing but incomplete records, supplementary information is drawn from the OCLC database, and holding information is verified or edited. Where no online record exists either in Princeton's or the OCLC's databases, a new record is created.
The process, which began with the new year, is expected to be
completed in the first quarter of the year 2000. At that time, the
University will have a full, unified catalog, except for
approximately 200,000 card catalog records in Chinese, Japanese
and Korean scripts, which will be added later.
Library staff members active in the database project include David Johnson (l), leader of the Slavic/Germanic languages cataloging team and technical liaison for the project; Donald Thornbury, head of the Catalog Division and also technical liaison for the project; Mary Brassell, assistant to Thornbury; and Maryann Langer, leader of the database interface unit in the Catalog Division.