Polaris Cataloging User Group - January 2025

Agenda:

What’s new in your library?

• Grand Forks Public Library- Nothing new; doing weeding of mysteries now.
• West Fargo Public Library- Prepping for the opening of the new satellite location. Standardizing records and labels, mostly from the Little Red Reading bus collection because most of those items are going over to the satellite location. The new location in City Hall will be opening in March.
• North Dakota State Library- they are weeding about 1000 large print books because they have a new large print standing order and they need to make room. Legislative session is going on, so people are sometimes tasked to get things ready or pull statistics quickly.
• North Dakota Vision Resource Center – Michele is at a small library where she does everything including cataloging. She is working on a project where she is splitting a collection of young adult large print into middle grade and young adult. Then she will do the same for the Braille.

Old items:

• Authors subfields out of sequence- in 2022 the ZMARC authorities load flipped the sequence in the 100 and 700 fields. Like this:

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  After cleaning all these up, I’ve seen several new ones appear. I have added checking and fixing these to my weekly routine.

New items:

• Polaris ticket- I discovered that Leap doesn’t delete fields as set out in the Bibliographic fields to Retain/Delete table. The Polaris client does. They replied that this is a known issue that has been sent to development and they’ll let me know when this is working again.
  • At next meeting Liz will bring to group list of MARC fields to automatically delete from records when they are brought into Polaris.
• Discuss the ODIN consortium shared bibliographic environment.
• Do you have internal rules that you use that could help others?
• Are there specific things that you teach new staff members?
• Are there unaddressed issues, or workflows that should be written as ODIN guidelines or policy?
  • Stacey from NDSL outlined some things she covers when training a new cataloger:
    • Rely on the 035 match for overlaying records, but be aware that the ND Vision Center uses records and modifies them when the book is actually Braille. Always check the records, and do not overlay a Braille record with a regular print book record, even in Polaris is telling you it is a match.
    • We are seeing more records from places other than OCLC in Polaris, and you won’t always see an 035 in those records. If the record is the same except that it doesn’t have an 035, it is okay to overlay it.
    • Sometimes when cataloging for a library she will see an on-order record that is very complete, but it has “BK” or something in the 035. In that case she overlays the record with one from OCLC before attaching her item to it.
    • This is a problem: sometimes when overlaying a record the system number from the record being overlayed is automatically placed in the 035 field with an (OCoLC) prefix. It should just go into that field without the prefix. When this happens she deletes the (OCoLC) prefix part.
    • Because records were merged together during migration the oclc number in the record may not be the correct OCLC number for the record the library has its holdings on. In that case you need to search OCLC for the record in order to delete holdings.
  • Discussed the table that retains fields during de-duping. This was set up during migration and might not be what we want anymore.
• Should there be guidelines posted on the ODIN website, possibly
  • about overlaying records
  • about adding local notes or other local fields
  • The group thought this was a good idea
• Polaris 7.7 release notes
  • New compare MARC records functionality
  • Ability to check for duplicates without saving