[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen & ebooks

[Jason Stephenson]

Quoting Donald Butterworth <don.butterworth at asburyseminary.edu>:

> Colleagues,
>
> I'm looking for some insights into how Evergreen libraries handle eBooks.
> Here is the scenario:
>
> We have access to a large number of ebooks because of a subscription to a
> database. Titles that are available as part of a subscription, can be added
> to or deleted at the whim of a publisher or vendor. So, do you include
> bibliographic records for those titles in Evergreen? If you do, is there a
> way that Evergreen can do a batch delete based on a list of titles supplied
> by the subscription database vendor?

We use this: http://git.mvlcstaff.org/?p=jason/safariload.git;a=summary

It works for our Safari Books Online subscription. The only other  
ebook subscription we have where we load records into the database  
does not have titles coming and going at the whim of the vendor, so  
one of our catalogers manages those records manually.

As a general point of advice, I recommend creating a new bibliographic  
source in config.bib_source and using that as the source for vendor's  
records. If you have more than 1 vendor, then I recommend that you  
create a unique source for each such vendor. This makes it easy to  
delete all the bibliographic records supplied by a given vendor.

If you want something to selectively delete bibliographic records,  
then I don't think there's a good way to do this in Evergreen. AFAIK,  
Vandelay does not delete records. There is a record status field in  
the MARC leader, but Vandelay ignores it. Safariload, linked above,  
actually looks at that field and deletes the matching record(s) by  
bib_source when the vendor has set the status to d.

>
> Thanks for you insights!
>
> Don
>
> Don Butterworth
> Faculty Associate / Librarian III
> B.L. Fisher Library
> Asbury Theological Seminary
> don.butterworth at asburyseminary.edu
> (859) 858-2227
>



-- 
Jason Stephenson
Assistant Director for Technology Services
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
Chief Bug Wrangler, Evergreen ILS