Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 18-25, 1999

Volume 28, Number 9

University Library begins major
expansion of its Orbis database

The Yale Library is undertaking a "broad and comprehensive" expansion of Orbis, its online bibliographic database, with the conversion of about 2 million catalog records into machine-readable form in the next three years.

This process, called retrospective conversion, will soon result in the addition of 50,000 new Orbis records every month. These new entries will represent monographs and serials held in over 15 libraries across the campus.

"The Yale Library regards the creation of a complete, reliable and robust online catalog as the single most important way we can improve services to readers," says University Librarian Scott Bennett. "Students and faculty alike are eager to see our catalog conversion completed."

Like most research libraries, Yale has been creating machine-readable catalog records for newly received materials since the mid-1970s. In 1989, about 900,000 of these records became the foundation of the Orbis database. Since then, the Yale Library has relied on a series of retrospective conversion initiatives to increase the number of older catalog records that are available in Orbis. Today the database includes almost 4 million bibliographic records.

"In contrast to past efforts," says Bennett, "the scope of our current retrospective conversion undertaking is broad and comprehensive." The multi-year effort will consist of several separate projects ranging in size from fewer than 20,000 to almost 2 million records, he explains.

Like most large research libraries, Yale has contracted an outside vendor to help with this massive conversion effort, says Martha Conway, catalog management librarian. Even so, considerable in-house expertise is required for each project, she says. "We are responsible for preparing technical specifications for the vendor, loading the records produced by the vendor into Orbis, and performing the necessary quality control and problem resolution activity."

The vendor Yale will use for most of the retrospective conversion is the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., a not-for-profit membership organization that provides computer-based products, services, and systems designed especially for libraries and other educational organizations. With more than 30,000 affiliated libraries in the United States and 65 other nations, OCLC is the largest library information network in the world. Since 1976, the OCLC RetroCon service has converted more than 60 million records for nearly 1,000 libraries in 25 countries throughout the world.

The Yale Library has been working with OCLC for several years under a number of project agreements. Under the most recent agreement, and with others in the works, OCLC will convert all remaining records except some representing material in non-Roman alphabet languages; those will be converted locally. OCLC will complete its portion of the conversion in 2002. The Yale Library expects to complete its portion of the conversion project by 2004.

According to Conway, more than 70 percent of the conversion will be accomplished using two alphabetically arranged catalogs containing main entries, author added entries, title added entries, and authority records for works held in all locations in the Yale University Library system, including school and departmental libraries.

"Together the catalogs consist of more than 6,000 drawers of cards," she says. "We packed, labeled, inventoried and shipped to OCLC approximately 15.9 tons of cards."

More than 30 staff members at OCLC will process as many as 75,000 cards every month. They will use the Orbis database as their point of departure for all activity associated with Yale's retrospective conversion. This has resulted in a number of quality improvements, such as eliminating the need to reconcile circulation information with the larger bibliographic records, and reducing the occurrence of separate entries for multiple copies of the books or other materials in the libraries' collections.

The Yale Library staff will also play an important role in the conversion. "The primary responsibility of the Catalog Management Team is to ensure that the records produced in the retrospective conversion process are of the highest quality," says Joan Swanekamp, chief cataloging librarian. "Every aspect of the project has been designed with quality as our primary goal."

Conway, who heads the Catalog Management Team, adds: "We systematically evaluate the records produced by OCLC and resolve a variety of problems that are flagged for our attention. I am in regular communication with OCLC staff, who by now are very familiar with our practices -- and our expectations."

Yale's commitment to a quality conversion effort extends beyond the life of the project. Records representing materials in non-Roman alphabet languages -- such as Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew -- will contain Romanized information and vernacular characters, even though most online systems, including Orbis, do not currently provide access to the vernacular data.

"The present and future usefulness of any file of machine-readable records is directly related to how well those records conform to national and international standards," notes Swanekamp. "We are confident that our commitment to those standards, especially when coupled with the indexing and display capabilities of a new bibliographic information system, will enable us to meet reader needs well into the next century."

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