I-Share | News

I-Share Universal Catalog rebuild to begin after July 7 updates
07/06/07

Beginning next week, the CARLI staff will be rebuilding the I-Share Voyager Universal Catalog (UC). The rebuild process is done every year or so to improve search precision by eliminating as many duplicate bibliographic records as possible, and is expected to take approximately three weeks to complete.

During the rebuild, the UC will be available for searching and placing requests, but after the updates made on Saturday July 7, it will be in a “frozen” status and will not reflect any additions, deletions or changes made to bibliographic records for approximately three weeks. During the UC rebuild, the 71 local I-Share databases will continue to be updated as usual. Item status information displayed in the Universal Catalog is retrieved from the local catalogs and consequently will remain current throughout the rebuild.

Throughout the rebuild, I-Share library staff will continue to be able to perform all staff functions such as circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, reserves and serials control. Library users will be able to place Universal Borrowing requests, and where allowed, requests for local items (such as closed stacks paging), and see their current status information in the “My Account” service of the WebVoyáge public catalog interface. Technical services staff that connect to the Universal Catalog to copy bibliographic records will continue to have this access throughout the rebuild process and do not need to make any changes in their Voyager clients to connect to the frozen UC.

Two differences will be apparent to people using the Universal Catalog during the rebuild. First, there will be a banner message indicating that the Universal Catalog was last updated on July 7, 2007. The second difference is that the “New in I-Share” service that provides a list of the records added to the I-Share Universal Catalog during the past month will show a diminishing set of titles during the rebuild since new titles are not being added to the UC during the rebuild. Cataloging done by the 71 I-Share libraries during the rebuild interval will be loaded into the Universal Catalog just before the rebuilt UC is brought online. This timing will have an impact on the “New Since” feature of the New in I-Share service as the New Since feature will consider these data new as of the date they were added to the Universal Catalog, even though they may have been added to the local catalog as much as three weeks earlier. It will take about a month after the rebuild is done for the New Since feature results to be completely back in synch with actual cataloging dates and with the new titles service in their local catalog, if the local library has chosen to implement it.

Eliminating duplicate records from the Universal Catalog enhances resource sharing by linking I-Share libraries’ holdings of the same title to the same bibliographic record in the UC, thereby making more copies available to fill requests placed for a title. Duplicate records are typically created in the Universal Catalog when a library uses a copy of a bibliographic record in its local Voyager database that does not include properly formatted standard control numbers (i.e., OCLC number, ISBN, ISSN, LCCN) on which de-duplication for the UC is based.

The rebuild process itself is carried out on one of CARLI’s test servers and will take about three weeks to complete. When it is completed, the frozen UC will be brought offline and the newly rebuilt UC will be moved from the test server to the production server. There will be one evening of downtime for the Universal Catalog while the rebuilt version is moved from test to production. As the process proceeds, CARLI staff will post status announcements and estimated and actual completion dates to our I-Share Announcements email list. (Note: this is a different list than the all-CARLI Announce list.) People who would like to receive those announcements should be sure to subscribe to that list by following the directions at this url: http://carli.illinois.edu/mailman/listinfo/i-share

When the rebuild is completed, the holdings of the 6 libraries that have just been added to I-Share will be displayed in the UC and will also be available for requesting through Universal Borrowing. The six new libraries are: Carl Sandburg College, Illinois Eastern Community Colleges, Knox College, Monmouth College, Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing, and Trinity International University.

Again, all Voyager services should be available throughout the rebuild, with the exception that all access to the Universal Catalog will be suspended after 5pm on the evening when we will replace the frozen UC with the newly rebuilt copy. Library staff should report any other Voyager system outages or slowdowns, and forward any questions on this project to CARLI’s technical support group either by email to support@carli.illinois.edu or by phoning 1-866-904-5843.

Thank you for your patience during this process.

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