OCLC Reclamation Q&A

Owned by Lauren Magnuson (Unlicensed)
Sept 18, 2015
2 min read

Fresno State recently completed an OCLC Reclamation project to sync their system holdings with WorldCat and also get OCLC numbers that may have been missing from their records.  While a reclamation is not essential, if you have reason to suspect you are missing a lot of OCLC numbers or your holdings are very out of sync with WorldCat, it may be a good time to do one of these projects before loading your records into Alma over the next two years.  Here's some information from Maria Pena and Emily Boss at Fresno State about their experience with their OCLC Reclamation (Thanks to Maria and Emily as well as Renaldo Gjoshe (Unlicensed).)

1)      How long did the reclamation project take?

Reclamation took approximately 8 weeks to complete. Records were uploaded to OCLC July 23rd and the final scan/delete was completed September 14th. However, we started to receive batches of our records back (with OCLC numbers) after only 4 weeks. The scan/delete is the final process of the reclamation after an OCLC representative has examined unresolved records or records that were not matched to an OCLC number.

2)      What was excluded from the records that were sent to OCLC (ex. ebooks, or other electronic resources)?

 Any electronic resources were excluded along with any bibs marked with withdrawn or delete (if you use that code).

3)      Can you share the load table that was used?

Yes, we can share the load table.  Our load table was created to upload brief MARC records from the reclamation’s xref reports.  The MARCs were created in MarcEdit with the OCLC# in the 001 and the Sierra bibliographic record number in the 907$a. 

4)      What fields were protected, if any? At Northridge for example they had captured and recorded the oclc number on different fields (sometimes 001, sometimes 019, etc).

We protected all but the 001; and we matched on the bibliographic record number.  Fresno likewise had OCLC numbers in the 001 as well as the 035. This can be accounted for when you fill out the reclamation paperwork for OCLC. We simply indicated we had two locations for OCLC numbers but that we wanted the inserted OCLC numbers to reside in the 001. We may go back later to globally delete the OCLC numbers in the 035 if they will cause problems in Alma.

5)      Can you share other do/don'ts?

Make sure the files you upload are small enough. We ended up having to split our original files from 40,000 records to 25,000 because they were too big to upload.