What’s happening at your library?
Cindy, Dickinson Public – She is playing catch-up because her coworker in cataloging retired at the end of April. They also closed for a month for the new carpeting project, and she wasn’t able to catalog during that time.
Jessica, ND State Library – In about a month, the State Library is going to begin moving the electronic files for state documents into the Preservica Repository system. They are then going to be updating all the state document records to reflect the new URL. It will be about 50,000 items, so it will be cool and exciting, but also a lot of work.
Audrey, Grand Forks Public – Things are going smoothly; however, the collection development team is looking into which vendor they should go with, as they’ve been having problems with both Baker and Taylor and Ingram. Audrey and Bobbi have noticed there’s no problem with getting Children’s material, but there are long lists of people waiting for big titles, and they are not showing up.
Stacey, ND State Library – She’s been working on different kits and special things for the lending machines. They have added Wazoodles, which is like a speaker device for kids, and some DVDs are now in the vending machines, which they are now rebranding as “lending machines.” They have some new kits, like financial literacy kits for teachers and librarians. They will be unveiled at their workshop next week, and that is when she will make them visible in the PAC. They also have some new giant sized games like Candy Land, Left, Right and Center, and Sorry.
Old items:
- Guidelines for shared bibliographic records in Polaris – decided to take a poll to approve it since the group didn’t have read it yet.
- FAQ/Best Practices document – decided to meet in August. People will bring answers to the FAQ questions and we can compile the document during the meeting.
- Follow up – 6XX fields with second indicator added to the Retain/Delete table.
- These fields have been added to the Bibliographic Tags to Retain/Delete table- at this time, Leap does not honor the “delete” part of this table.
- Ex Libris case: 07861805- “Under development.”
New items:
- Carousels and book covers display questions- How long for book cover images to appear? How large can carousel record sets be?
- Cindy has noticed their audiobooks don’t have images, and she takes them out of the carousel when she notices.
- Liz noted that she thinks the images appear right away if there is one. The images come from Syndetics and depend upon Syndetics having the image. They match on ISBN and UPC code, so images do sometimes appear for games.
- Lynn looked up how many titles can be in a carousel, and it is 50 titles. If the set has more than 50, the first 50 in title order will appear in the carousel.
- In a follow-up email (8/8/2025), Dustin said he has had good luck emailing Syndetics the ISBN and an image, and they add it in a couple of days.
- URI Strings in MARC records ($1 strings in 100, 700, 600, etc.)
- Dustin sent a video to the listserv that explains what the URIs are and how OCLC is adding them to bibliographic records. https://www.oclc.org/go/en/on-demand/meridian/transformative-leaders-us…
- The only efficient way to delete these would be to edit your MARC file before importing using MarcEdit and delete the 600 $1 subfield (for example).
- There was some discussion on the IUG forums about these and someone suggested an Idea Exchange that asks Polaris to suppress them in the Mac Editor so we don’t see them, but to not actually delete them.
- Jessica thinks the URI strings are pretty harmless and potentially useful in the long run since it is an early precursor of getting us into BIBFRAME, eventually.
- Audrey gets a lot of pop-ups that say the links are invalid during overlay. She is just accepting it, but it it is invalid is it useful?
- Liz suggests testing the URI to see if it really is invalid, and reporting back.
- Polaris 7.8 is now available on the training server and will be in production on August 13. Things of interest to this group:
- Creating and managing MARC Import profiles o New Views in Leap Work forms – Purchase orders and Invoice records are visible now from Bibliographic and Item records
- ODIN will be doing an RFP for an ADA-compliant discovery layer.
- Only in the planning stage right now, but many of the possible discovery solutions have the functionality to allow libraries to upload images for objects and “library of things.”
- News from the Innovative Product Status Board (https://portal.productboard.com/iii/6-innovative-product-status-board-n…)
- Display Item Handling – “Support configuration of shelf locations for in-library displays, which will be visible to patrons and automatically revert to their real shelf location upon check-in.” (Q4 2025, Polaris 8.0)
- Customizable TOMs – “Support the ability for libraries to create custom cataloging rules and modify the existing rules used to determine the type of material (TOM) for a bibliographic record.” (H1 2026, Polaris 8.1)
Polaris tickets:
- Retain/Delete table- Leap is not observing this table, only Polaris Client
- System number copied to 035 with (OCoLC) prefix during overlay process
- Cindy has noticed this as well, and it seems like it happens with there is already a second 035 in the record.
- Ticket response: “I checked with my team, and it appears that is functioning as designed. If an 003 OCoLC is present in the existing database record, when you overlay it, it follows the same rules as when you are importing an OCLC record, in that it constructs an 035 $a(OCoLC)123455 from a combination of the 003 and 001 in the existing record that is being overlaid. I think an enhancement would be to have the 003 field be deleted as part of the process after the initial import once the 003/001 field containing the OCLC number was created in the initial import. You can request that in ideas.iii.com. However, my team leader informed me that this is not considered a bug.
So the workaround for now is either to manually delete the 003 field in a record to be overlain, before the overlay, or to delete the resulting 035 in the final merged record before saving.” – Liz will add this to the FAQ document.