On-the-Fly Retro Procedures
When Circulation encounters an item lacking a barcode, or whose
barcode number is not present in the system, they create an on-the-fly record
(a brief non-MARC bibliographic record containing only call number, author,
title, and item record).
Eventually such records are eliminated when they are reconciled with existing
full bibliographic records. If no such record has ever existed, however, or
if the full bibliographic record has in some way been lost from the system,
it becomes necessary to retrospectively convert the item to provide full bibliographic
access for the patron.
Note: Serial and serial analytic records should be referred to the Serials Librarian.
- One way to locate these brief records is to create a list
of all such records in the system.
A typical search strategy might be to search for all bibliographic
records which lack any INNOPAC "MARC" fields but which do have
attached item records and which do include the characters "unl" in
the location field (03).
- The list must be inspected for extraneous records.
The most common of these are records created by the Reserve Room for
photocopies and personal copies. Government Publications also creates
brief records for their items.
- The remaining items are searched on the PAC by call number
(ignore any Community College or Nevada State College records found) for existing
bibliographic records.
A search by title and/or author may also be made.
If a full record is found, the records are reconciled in the same manner as
when processing routine on-the-fly items. See the procedure sheet "On the fly books: processing" for detailed procedures.
- If no bibliographic record is found, do not upgrade the on-the-fly record
as described in the above procedure sheet.
Instead, have a student assistant retrieve the item from the shelf.
Check the items out to your cataloging (not personal) checkout card.
- Search OCLC for a bibliographic record. If a record is found:
- If the record shows "No holdings in UNL", catalog
the item as if new, and as appropriate to the cataloging level
of the copy found.
Add the OCLC number to the title page of the book. If major problems are
encountered with the call number on the item, you may need to change the
call number and have the item relabeled.
- If the record shows "Held by UNL", attempt to locate
the record on INNOPAC by using the OCLC number (there may be
some error in the 245 tag so the title files wrong, there may be
some discrepancy in call number, there may be a typo of some
kind that keeps the record from coming up as it should, etc.).
Check the barcode to see if there is a duplicate. Has it been
done as an analytic or serial item? If absolutely no record
can be found in the local database, export the bibliographic
record from OCLC and transfer the item record.
- Finished items should be returned to Circulation. Do not
have items returned directly to the shelf.
Statistics:
- In all cases, add all database transactions to your statistics
sheet.
- If no holdings were found on OCLC for the item, so that a new
record was added to the database, count the item as a retro
conversion.
- If holdings were found on OCLC for the item, whether or not a
record was added to the database, do not count the item as a
retro conversion.
