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E-book & Streaming Media Management

This guide describes E-book and streaming media collection management resources and tips.

Get MARC Records

To harvest e-resources records in batch, depending on the information you have, you have several options:

WCM

To find a collection and download MARC records from WCM:

  • Log into WCM, select Collection Manager on the left. Select the appropriate scope: My Selected Collections (owned/downloaded), All Collections, or Not Selected Collections. You can search collection name by typing the collection name or keywords.

            

  • Your library may purchase/own the whole collection or only some titles in this collection (e.g. SDSU only selected 2221 titles of the Hathitrust US collection; those titles are provided by Ex Libris Central Discovery Index)
         
    • If your library has access to all titles in the collection
      • Click Select for the collection you want, then click the name of the collection to change settings for the collection
      • Click Holdings and MARC Records and Enable MARC Record Delivery
      • Change settings in the Customize Records and Record Delivery based on your library's needs. SDSU configured monthly data sync between WCM and Alma, so we set monthly updates for MARC records from WCM. Each collection is recommended to have a unique file name for data delivery

      • Select Review Summary & Save on the top. It may take a few days for WCM to prepare for the MARC records for the collection you selected. You have three options to download the MARC
        1. Click My Files under Collection Manager on the left and select Downloads. Find the delivery file name you set for the collection in the list and select Download
        2. Set up data sync between Alma and WCM for the collection
        3. Use FTP
          • Check with OCLC to get your library's user and password. Host and other FTP related information can be found on this OCLC support page
          • SDSU uses FileZilla for FTP file exchange. Select File > Site Manager on the top menu in FileZilla to create a new site. In this way, FileZilla can save WCM FTP settings and one can select the saved site in the future. 
          • Connect to WCM FTP service
            • New MARC delivery can be found in: /xfer/metacoll/out/ongoing/new
            • Updated MARC delivery can be found in: /xfer/metacoll/out/ongoing/updates
            • Deleted MARC delivery can be found in: /xfer/metacoll/out/ongoing/deletes
    • If not, click the name of the collection and go to the title-level page. After selecting the records you want, set up Holdings and MARC Records and Enable MARC Record Delivery settings and download records as the above session described

Z39.50 Harvesting

In some cases, the collection you want does not exist in WCM and you only have their OCLC number/ISBN/ISSN. To batch downloading their MARC records, using Z39.50 is a good option.

  • Create a TXT file for the identifiers of the records (OCLC number/ISBN/ISSN). It does not need a header, the first row should start with the first identifier. One identifier per row.
  • Open MarcEdit > Select Z39.50/SRU Client > Select Actions > Add new Z39.50 Server > Enter host, database, and port information as below. The username and password are the same with the one you used in OCLC Connexion. If you have any errors, see details in this OCLC support page.
  • Check the box for Batch Search
  • In the dropdown list under Search, select the appropriate search criteria (Record Number means OCLC number), select the file for the OCLC numbers/ISSN/ISBN. Click Search and select a path for the downloaded MARC record.

Download from Connexion

Depending on the number of the records you want to select and download from OCLC number, there are two ways:

  • If just a few number of records need to be selected
    • In OCLC Connexion, Tools > Options > Export > Select File ... export to local folder > Click Apply
    • Select the records and download those
  • If there are a large number of records that need to be harvested
    • Use Z39.50 harvesting by OCLC number
  • Check if all records have one and only 856. Make sure all harvested records have one and only available 856

Vendor Provided

If vendor can provide good quality MARC records for titles in the e-collection, that is always the best. However, there are two things you may want to check before loading those records into Alma:

  • If the records have OCLC number
    • No OCLC: what Alma will do when importing
    • Have OCLC and perpetual access: consider include the collection in OCLC reclamation
  • If the records are not encoded in UTF-8: covert
OCLC Number

Some vendor-provided ebook collection records do not have OCLC number in 035 field or any system control number in 035/024 field(s). They only come with a vendor system control number in 001 field. If we do not copy the vendor control number to an appropriate field before importing the records into Alma, Alma will replace the 001 field with Alma MMSID and create a 035 as other system control number. Depending on your consortium or local cataloging rules, you may want to create a local field for the vendor control number. This guide will help you achieve that.

If you have perpetual access to the e-collection and titles in it have OCLC number, you may consider to add this collection in the OCLC reclamation project.

UTF-8 Encoding

Every files uploaded to Alma should be UTF 8 Unicode. Otherwise, some special characters like copyright symbol wouldn't be shown correctly in Alma and Primo. MARC files from Gale for example use MARC 8 instead of UTF 8 and conversion for their records are necessary. 

If you have MARC records from vendors, please check the encoding and convert the characters using MarcEdit before importing anything into Alma:

  • Open MarcEdit, select Character Conversion Tools and click Characterset Conversions

         

  • Select the source and destination file. Choose MARC 8 as the Original Encoding and choose UTF 8 as the Final Encoding.

The file generated by MarcEdit should follow UTF 8 encoding.