We put a "cat date" timestamp on anything that we want to mark as being officially cataloged. This can be done by a cataloger in-house or during the process of loading records from specific vendors (Coutts shelf-ready, outsourced titles from BSLW, etc.). The presence of a cat date indicates a certain level of quality and finality. A cataloger either looked at the record individually or used an automated process to verify its quality. The presence of a cat date also indicates that the record may be sent out for certain batch processing and/or cleanup. Depending on the presence of other fields or data, processing may include the following:
- Holdings information sent to:
- WorldCat
- RapidILL
- HathiTrust
- Access PA
- Coutts/OASIS
- Cleanup and record enhancement by Marcive
In Millennium, we used the III fixed field CAT DATE; that value migrated and in Alma is stored in 998$c. In Alma, the cat date is generated from the value in the 005 when a cataloger "enhances" a record with a 997 processing field; the cat date is stored in 997$a.
To make the cat date easily findable in both these fields, we use Brief Level rules. Any record that has either a 998$c or a 997$a becomes a Brief Level 10 record in Alma. Brief Level is indexed in both Alma and Analytics.