Hi, Lai-Ying:

A lot of our current practice and decisions in choosing MARC holdings 866 field over 853/863 were impacted by: 1) how data was entered in the legacy systems at local ILS, regional Union Lists of Serials, and OCLC WorldCat; 2) how much cleanup effect we could afford during migration; and 3) standards like ANSI/NISO Z39.71-2006 was not formalized before the needs to standardize holdings statements for bibliographic items among all library resource sharing partners, etc.

For instance, if in previous systems, "Library Has" is the only info available for locating updated level-3 summary holdings in textual format in MARC bib 599 field, and if you have less than one month to migrate MARC bib 599 field into MARC holdings format, which field would you choose for filling in the textual formatted holdings statement, considering that you have to deal with 1600 periodical titles within the time constraints, and only two people who are authorized to work on updating the statement: one for local holdings and one for union list of serials?
 
In addition, for some libraries, item-level holdings are created through Check-in, barcoding and other processes, e.g. RFID tag or QR code.  If so, it should be the ILS systems to generate MARC Holdings 853 field based on Check-in pattern, and 863 field for level 4 holdings statement in either itemized or compressed format as soon as the item in hand is barcoded, RFID tagged or QR coded.  The systems should compute the summary level holdings based on the availability and status of barcoded items, and expose summary holdings info into Union List of Serials for CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations in regional catalog and WorldCAT, etc.

As for e-holdings in 856$3, I am wondering if you can get the same data to be reported by Serials Solutions Client or others where you maintain your current database or individual journal title subscriptions.  What I am concerned about is how your library update 856$3.  Subscription profiles might be the only place where current date coverage for each title can be found.  Once you get the useful data, you can create MARC holdings statement for e-holdings.  The advantage is that you can maintain single version of truth of your library's current subscription in one place, output and distribute them to where they should reside, e.g. Union List of Serials, WorldCAT, etc. 

Whether you should adopt 853/863 now for print holdings, you need to check with your library manager and see where they want to lead your library.  As far as I am concerned, I would recommend us checking into the structure of item record first, for instance, what info are essential, but missing as we never have to deal with the requirement before, RFID, QR Code, fine-grained statistical category code, etc.?  I would tag them in standardized format using serials check-in module, item record creation function, etc.; and roll up the itemized holdings statement into summary holdings from local and regional systems to national bibliographic utilities, etc. 

A lot of creative things can happen if we tag them correctly with multiple arrays of means to access and manage serials holdings data.  As for how library should be transitioned from physical libraries in a digital world, here is my 2 cents of comments in a blog for Everything is Miscellaneous written by davidw on Nov. 22nd, 2011, retrieved from http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2011/11/22/physical-libraries-in-a-digital-world/#comments

I am sorry that I have to ask you to think about the big picture first.  It's easy for us to reach an agreement on what we should do next, to what extent we should work on them, and how we achieve the objectives once we can make a difference to the big picture. 
     
Hope it helps!!!
  
Amanda Xu
 

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Lai-Ying Hsiung <lhsiung@ucsc.edu> wrote:
Hi, Amanda:

III has a separate holding record that has free text "Library Has: ".
However, are you aware that anyone has just mapped III's holding
record "Library Has:" to MARC holding 866, unless they also start to
use 853/863?  I am still wondering whether it is optimal to spend lots
of resources in coding 853/863 for print holdings when they are
dwindling, while e-serial holdings are still in free text 856 $3.

Our library is debating whether we should adopt 853/863 for print
holdings now.  Thus my question here. Any comments?
Lai-Ying

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Amanda Xu <axu789@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's hard to tell you how without looking into something like, e.g. if your
> original holdings statement in text format or even MARC format has any
> pattern or not.  To make such conversion happen, I worked with Gary L.
> Strawn, ExLibris Voyager Tech Support and our systems office due to limited
> access to the systems, etc.
>
> We migrated all of serials holdings statement from MARC bib 590 field into
> MARC holdings 86x fields in Voyager MFHD, including periodicals and
> continuations during migration from PALS to Voyager in summer 2004.
>
> Later for data recovery, I recovered holdings and barcoded item data through
> Voyager Oracle report in Web Admin, and converted the files into MARC
> holdings format and Voyager item format in batch processing mode using
> UltraEdit, MARCEdit, and asked ExLibris Voyager Tech Support team to load
> the data into our Voyager database.
>
> It's a round trip data mapping and conversion process using NotePad,
> UltraEdit, Access, Excel, MARCEdit, Voyager Bulk import and export utility,
> and data report utilities in Voyager Web Admin, etc.
>
> It still required some manual verification and a little cleanup because the
> input data was not consistent in MARC 590 field due to the changing of
> encoding format for serials, turnover of the people working on holdings
> updates in local systems, and OCLC Union List of Serials, etc.  However, we
> proved that it's a scalable solution for library wanting to automate
> holdings data, including e-holdings for MFHDs and items.
>
>
> Hope it helps!
>
> Amanda Xu
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Christina Torbert <ctorbert@olemiss.edu>
> wrote:
>>
>> Our library has worked very hard to get our print holdings into MARC
>> Format, but now we want to share that information with a third party listing
>> service that has its own, different date format options.  Specifically, they
>> need the beginning and ending dates in separate, delimited fields.  And they
>> don’t want the volume information at all.
>>
>>
>>
>> Customer Service says they do not have an automated way to convert our
>> information and did not answer when I asked if their offer to copy-and-paste
>> included moving date information.
>>
>>
>>
>> So I am looking for a way to more easily convert MFHD into different date
>> formats without setting the whole department to cutting and pasting,
>> line-by-line.  Has anyone else worked through this problem successfully?
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you .
>>
>>
>>
>> Christina Torbert
>>
>> Head of Serials and
>>
>> Bibliographer for Philosophy and Religion
>>
>> J.D. Williams Library
>>
>> University of Mississippi
>>
>> 662-915-7059
>>
>> 662-915-6744 fax
>>
>> ctorbert@olemiss.edu
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>



--
Amanda Xu

Apprentice to Information Artistry & IT Librarian for Collection Management
Still In Progress
P.O. Box 650295
Fresh Meadows, NY 11365