[Evergreen-general] How do you keep your OCLC holdings up to date?

[Josh Stompro]

Hello Benjamin, we use the OCLC Metadata api to keep our holdings up to
date in OCLC on a twice daily basis.  It is a process based off of a custom
db table that just holds all the OCLC numbers found in our DB, and a few
bash and perl scripts.  We don't try and track last copies being withdrawn,
we just let them know any time an OCLC number is no longer associated with
any available copies, and vice versa.

I also had a system setup to upload files of adds and deletes, but that was
such a pain because someone at OCLC had to manually process them, and
randomly they would just skip doing it.  Or else it would take them between
1 and 18 days to process the file.  So I had to also have a system to check
if or when they actually processed it.  The Metadata api simplifies that.

The metadata api does have issues with subsumed numbers though... they will
sometimes return the new OCLC number so we can update our numbers, but
sometimes they won't and they just report the old number as not existing.
So I think we will have to do a manual reclamation once a year to catch
those.  (There is a way to get a dump of bibs that OCLC thinks you have to
compare with what you actually have for free.)

The API hasn't always been smooth going, OCLC switched servers last year
and cloudflare started blocking all our requests.  There was zero debugging
info on our end, just dropped connections.  It took months to get in touch
with someone that could actually fix it.

I'm happy to share all my code and notes if anyone wants it.

Josh

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 10:31 AM Murphy, Benjamin via Evergreen-general <
evergreen-general at list.evergreen-ils.org> wrote:

> We’ve been talking with some academic libraries about using Evergreen. An
> important process for them is keeping their OCLC holdings information up to
> date. For those of you that use OCLC, do you have and sort of automated
> procedures that help you update your holdings information?
>
>
>
> *Benjamin Murphy*
>
> NC Cardinal Program Manager
>
> State Library of North Carolina
>
> *benjamin.murphy at ncdcr.gov <benjamin.murphy at ncdcr.gov> * |
> https://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/services-libraries/nc-cardinal
>
> 109 East Jones Street  | 4640 Mail Service Center
>
> Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-4600
>
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>
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