News

ACTION:  Informational

As many of you have already noticed, the 001 tag/CLC No. in Sierra bibliographic records are now reflecting the prefix of “on” for accession numbers of 10 digits or more.  OCLC has increased the length of the OCLC number to accommodate a variable length number string.  See below for further details.

Format of the OCLC Number…

The OCLC Number resides in the MARC 001 field and may also be stored in other fields.  The OCLC Number in the 001 field is formatted as follows, and may appear in one or more of these forms in the record:

OCLC numbers 1 through 99999999:

• “ocm” prefix
• oclc control number, 8 digits, right justified with leading zeros
• blank
  Example: ocm00012345 

OCLC numbers 100000000 to 999999999:

• “ocn” prefix
• oclc control number, 9 digits
  Example: ocn123456789 

OCLC numbers 1000000000 and higher:

• “on” prefix
• oclc control number, 10 or more digits
  Example: on1234567890 or on1234567890123

When stored in the 035 field, the OCLC  number is usually stored with the prefix (OCoLC) and without the “ocm”, “ocn” or “on” prefixes; for example: (OCoLC)1234567890 

When this change takes place… the “on” prefix will be used to identify OCLC Numbers that contain ten or more digits.  Nine or eight digit OCLC Numbers will continue to use the “ocn” or “ocm” prefix as described above.  The update to the OCLC Number is backwards compatible so that previously defined OCLC Numbers will not be impacted.  Previously assigned OCLC Numbers will continue to work as before.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns,

Sandy Tedder

PrairieCat Cataloging and Database Coordinator
Reaching Across Illinois Library System
Bolingbrook Office
Phone: 779.205.4198
Fax: 815.886.5651
sandy [dot] tedder [at] railslibraries [dot] info
http://www.railslibraries.info

PrairieCat:
https://support.prairiecat.info
helpmenow [at] prairiecat [dot] info

This month's Tip of the Month is an overview for staff of eCommerce, the function that lets end users pays fines and fees online through the PrairieCat online catalog. The Training Committee has also created a bookmark for patrons that is available in PDF or in MSWord for customizing. 

As previously announced, PrairieCat is revamping our standing committee structure for FY18. We made these changes to streamline the decision making process and to further empower the groups. The committees will share information and updates with the membership at bi-annual PrairieCat Member Updates, which also serve as a networking opportunity for members.

The Administrative Council made appointments for FY18 for the Circulation Committee and the Technical Services Committee to assist with the transition.  In the future these two committees will be elected. Congratulations to the newly appointed committee members! The committee members can be found on the website under Members>Standing Groups. The attached document has more details about these changes.