The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
With vendors like ebrary, EBSCO, etc. providing Patron Driven Acquisitions models, libraries are loading thousands (tens of thousands, really) of records for items they do not actually hold, electronically or otherwise.
This makes sense from a discovery standpoint, but it undermines the catalog's other role as an inventory control system.
If your library is participating in such a model, what do you do to identify resources that have actually been purchased vs. what is merely available for purchase? Is your method machine-readable (available, not necessarily indexed, via, e.g., Z39.50)?
Are there any standards or conventions around this?
Ross Singer
As far as I'm aware, there isn't currently a standard. Our practice is to add a label of some sort to the MARC record identifying the "available" records that is replaced by a "purchased" label when the item is selected via PDA. We've indexed this field in our ILS, which allows us to quickly retrieve/hide them from our OPAC and discovery system (if you're using a deposit account and it runs out, for example), and we also used this field to purge the non-purchased records when our pilot program expired, without purging the purchased ones.
I can't comment on whether or not this is available via Z39.50 (I'm just not experienced enough with Z39.50 to say one way or another), but it's a standardized field internally (that is machine-populated on load/purchase) that allows us to reliably retrieve the records via our ILS's retrieval jobs.