Many thanks to those who responded to my query (see below). The main suggestion was to protect the MeSH headings on our existing records so that those fields are not overwritten by any incoming Serials Solutions record. Unfortuntely, that is not possible in our Endeavor Voyager system, because fields are not protectable at the indicator level (MeSH headings differ from non-MeSH headings only in the second indicator of the 650). So, our choice would be not to protect  the MeSH headings at all or to protect all subject headings from overlay, and we wouldn't want to do the latter. Other ILS's may offer better flexibility in this regard.

Wayne

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>We just recently started subscribing to the Serials Solutions MARC records service for our ejournals. It has generally been excellent, but one thing we hadn't considered was that there are many CONSER records (the go-to source of records for Serials Solutions and other similar vendors) which lack MeSH headings, and so the result is either that we accept the fact that a SerSols record without MeSH headings will overwrite our current record which has them, or that we make a local change to the SerSols record once we have it -- but that means that future loads from SerSols for that record will not automatically overwrite it because the local changes are protected.

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Wayne Jones
Head, Central Technical Services
Queen's University Library
Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room B100A
Kingston, ON
K7L 5C4
tel: (613) 533-2802
fax: (613) 533-6819
email: jonesw@post.queensu.ca