OCLC CIP Upgrade Unit reaches 200,000-title milestone

In late February, the OCLC CIP Upgrade Unit at Academic Book Center in Portland, Oregon, hit the milestone of 200,000 titles processed. Academic was one of the first book vendors to be an active OCLC PromptCat service partner and provides a home to the first off-site OCLC TechPro service operation.

The CIP Upgrade Unit, started in November 1995, upgrades the master Cataloging in Publication (CIP) records in the WorldCat database to save libraries time and make cataloging more efficient. Before that time, routine CIP upgrading by anyone other than the Library of Congress was nonexistent, so each library needed to upgrade the record each time a CIP book was received.

"To do this upgrading, you of course have to have access to the books," said Morgan McCune, TechPro supervisor in Portland. "As a vendor, Academic gets the books before libraries get them, and they were gracious enough to invite OCLC to house our staff here onsite. It’s been a fantastic arrangement."

When Academic Book Center receives the new books from the publishers, their computer system flags one copy to be sent to the OCLC office. "Then they put them on book trucks and literally wheel them over to us," said Ms. McCune.

OCLC staff then, within a standard 48-hour turnaround time, search WorldCat and permanently upgrade those records that require it. And once a record is upgraded, the hundreds of libraries that eventually receive the book are free of the upgrading burden.

As of March 22, according to Ms. McCune, the CIP Upgrade Unit has upgraded 75,822 records of the 209,251 total titles received since the start of the unit. "The Academic staff sends all new book titles that their computer system tells them haven’t been to OCLC before," said Ms. McCune. "And between the books obtained through Academic’s approval plan and the books ordered through firm order, those titles have included all kinds, from the most scholarly books and medical texts to popular fiction and children’s books."

The Upgrade Unit, which comprises five catalogers, has received as many as 6,673 titles in a month.

The majority of the Portland-based TechPro unit’s efforts are concentrated on the Library of Congress Level 8 records that are created before the book is published--with whatever information is available at the time. The upgrading consists mainly of adding information that wasn’t available prior to publication--number of pages, height of the book, physical description, etc.

Most OCLC member libraries do not have the authorization to upgrade the master record to make it a full-level record. "That’s why what we’re doing here at Academic is so helpful to member libraries," said Ms. McCune.

Of the 209,251 titles received, the OCLC staff has also created 418 original records "from scratch," with no beginning copy from LC. Ms. McCune points out that 352 of these records were made this fiscal year. "Previously," she says, "we would do these original records once in a great while--mostly for TechPro projects--but now it’s a regular addition to our workflow."

In addition to upgrades and original record creation, the TechPro staff has begun contributing and editing name authority and series authority records in the national file on a regular basis as part of the Name Authority Cooperative project. Ms. McCune and members of her staff have undergone extensive training and have recently become independent in personal names and are working toward independence in corporate names and series authorities as well.

"We’re still working out what this all means to our present workflow, but since we began authority work, we have added 166 new authorities to the database and edited 298 existing authority records," said Ms. McCune. "Previously, we had to send all information having to do with authority work to OCLC in Dublin, so it’s very exciting to be able to do this work ourselves."

"In fact though, we couldn’t do any of this by ourselves," Ms. McCune said. "The biggest significance of the 200,000-plus records processed by us is the cooperative relationship between OCLC and Academic. This is a relationship that we’ve all grown to truly appreciate. Not only have they made adjustments in their workflow to accommodate CIP upgrades, they have really ‘adopted’ us. The people at Academic have been very friendly and gracious, inviting us to their picnics, pizza lunches and other events. As a remote site of a larger unit, this kind of warmth helps us feel less isolated. And in that regard, the people at Academic are not only contributing to a project that benefits the libraries they serve, they’re contributing to our individual well-being in their workplace."

For an in-depth look at the work of the CIP Upgrade Unit, see the OCLC CIP Record Upgrade Project Specifications page.--Jeff Ivany is contributing writer.