Z3950 Record Import
Z39.50 is a standard for sharing Bibliographic and Authority records
in-between libraries. This can be very useful to add books to the
catalog without having to fill in all the MARC fields by hand. The
system resides at https://catalogue.rietveldacademie.nl/eg/staff/cat/z3950/search
and it works as follows:
- Select from the List “Service and Credentials” the Z39.50 service(s)
you want to search at.
- Add one or more values to search for in the bibliographic fields
that appear.
- Click Search and the results will appear in a long
list.
- You can then select one record from the list for import.
It might be that some of the services are down / unmaintained, but in
general you should always get some results from the Library of Congress.
There is a a pair of things to take into account when importing records
from external libraries:
- First of all, a lot of un-wanted noise is imported too, if one does
not take care to remove the un-related fields. So when searching to the
Z39.50 interface, one should use the Edit then Import
button, to remove the unwanted fields from the MARC before importing the
record (for example many Libraries have their own keywording or
classification systems we do not want to import, and there is a lot of
noise in the 0xx and 9xx fields to be removed).
- There is also a more subtle question, about what to import from the
bibliographic fields. Do the descriptions produced by the Library of
Congress of the United States always fit how an art school speaks about
their books? Is there a trade off when we give up our own modes of
classifying and giving keywords to our own references? To reflect
further on these questions, at some point Infrastructural Manoeuvres
came up with a tool to compare records for the same book.. See the Marc Comparison section.