ICAT Statement on Deletion of 029 Fields in Bibliographic Records

March 11, 2010

The CARLI Office has received several questions lately asking if it was permissible for I-Share libraries to delete the bibliographic 029 field. OCLC’s “Bibliographic Formats and Standards” document defines the 029 field as:

“OCLC uses field 029 for system control numbers for records from non-OCLC automated systems (e.g., Library and Archives Canada, the British Library, WorldCat Cataloging Partners vendors, etc.). OCLC uses these numbers to process and track records from other systems.”

As the number of 029 fields included in individual bib records continues to grow, discussion of their usefulness outside of OCLC’s internal processing has been seen on various email discussion lists, including OCLC-CAT. The question about deleting bib record 029 fields was forwarded to the I-Share Cataloging and Authority Control Team (ICAT), and the topic was an agenda item at their March 9, 2010 meeting.

ICAT’s discussion included these factors:

the 029 field is not an indexed field in Voyager
the 029 field is not likely to be useful for de-duplication purposes
the 029 field is not considered an access point

After discussion, ICAT members came to the consensus that due to the factors above, deleting the 029 field would not violate the spirit of the “Cooperative Cataloging Guidelines for I-Share Databases” document, available from the URL below:

http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-prod/I-Share/cat/coop_cat_guidelines.html

Therefore, it is permissible for I-Share library cataloging staff to delete all 029 fields in existing Voyager bib records. In addition, it is permissible for staff to set their OCLC Connexion options to delete the 029 field as part of the export function. The document entitled “Importing Bibliographic Records from OCLC to Local Voyager Databases” (URL below) has been updated to include deleting the 029 field, in addition to the currently-recommended deletion of the “second” 035 field.

http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-prod/I-Share/secure/cat/importbibs.pdf

Finally, effective March 15, 2010, all routine bulk import jobs for files of OCLC bib records (e.g., the daily EDX update/produce transactions, PromptCat records, Bibliographic Notification records loaded in batch) will include a pre-processing step to delete all 029 fields present in the incoming bib records.

Please contact the CARLI Office if there are any questions about this matter.