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However, Institutions typically receive MARC data in .mrc or .out (Millennium) formats from Library Management Systems (LMS). This can be converted to MARCXML format with help of third-party tools such as MARCEdit for Windows, YAZ for Linux or other tools recommended by Library of Congress. The Institution should ensure the integrity of data so converted as certain tools are known to mess data owing to encoding problems (A version of YAZ always ignored or replaced diacritic characters).
Holdings and Items Item data
The 9XX fields are earmarked for institution specific data in MARC and this is widely leveraged by LMS to carry Item and Holding information apart from the 841-88X fields earmarked for holdings and item data. Care should be employed to extract such information for load into corresponding holding and item tables.
Export of MARC data from legacy LMS may not be completealso remain incomplete. In Millennium, for example, the MARC records extracted so exported lacked Item Bar code and Status information and necessitated a special plugin from Innovative Interfaces, Inc (III) to extract the same. the whole record.
Control Fields
Certain LMS allow institutions to have alphanumeric Control Field 001. However, OLE supports only a 11 digit integer as the Bib Id. There are also instances when a single bib record held multiple Control Field 003 values owing to lax validation requirements of legacy LMS.
It is therefore advisable to write a small program to extract information from these 9XX fields to construct the CSV formatted file to load the data into the holding and item tables. This program would parse the MARCXML converted from the MARC file and extract crucial item and holding data. The program can also be used to manipulate Bib data - replace Control Field 001, remove duplicate Control Field 003, move the alpha numeric Control Field 001 to a 9XX field, etc.