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Collections & Technical Services
June 2006
Issue: 203

Changes to MARC Records in WorldCat as Seen in FirstSEarch and WorldCat Resource Sharing

On Sunday May 21, OCLC made changes to MARC records that will affect how some records are retrieved and displayed in WorldCat on FirstSearch and WorldCat Resource Sharing. These changes include:

A new language code “zxx” will be used when there is No Linguistic Content. This code tends to be used for sound recordings. These records will display the language information as “No Linguistic Content”. All records which currently have no language code will be changed to the zxx code.
When using the Expert search, the language index can now be searched with two character ISO codes as well as three character MARC codes and the English values for those codes. For example, the language search “French”, “fre” and “fr” all retrieve the same results.
A new document type has been added. This document type is called "Integrated Resources" in the cataloging service and called “Continually Updated Resources” in FirstSearch and WorldCat Resource Sharing. This document type is used for resources that are expected to change over time, when information is added or deleting to keep the item up-to-date. These materials include loose-leaf notebooks, databases, and websites. The new document type has been added to the list of available document type limits in the Advanced and Expert search screens.
Please note: Only records updated or added to WorldCat since May 21, 2006 are indexed both ways. Until the entire WorldCat database is re-indexed, the majority of records will only have the terms indexed with the apostrophe deleted and the space concatenated. Therefore, to execute a complete search for “apprenti”, you will still need to also include the search “lapprenti”. When WorldCat’s re-indexing is completed, OCLC will inform users of the change.
The subject indexes will include two new subject fields which now may be added to records in WorldCat. They are the “Chronological Term” (MARC field 648) and the “Faceted Topical Term” (MARC field 654). Because the the “Chronological Term is a new field in WorldCat, all incidences will be indexed as part of the Subject indexes and display in FirstSearch under Subjects with the label “Time:”. However, because the “Faceted Topical Term”was an existing field, only newly added or updated records with this field will be indexed until WorldCat is completely re-indexed.

[OCLC - edited by J. Penn, Resource Sharing Librarian, Nylink]