Hi all,

In lieu of all the emails about OCLC deduping records, and my emails a week or so ago asking the best way to determine my cataloging's impact on OCLC, are there some specific marc fields that we can intentionally leave alone, or intentionally manipulate, to guarantee specific results in OCLC?  If I understand correctly, any records I create in SIRSI, that are monthly tape loaded to OCLC, automatically become institution records.  Why a specific record is or is not linked to a specific master, I'm not clear.

For example, so far today I've copy cataloged several national forest maps and one map of Route 66 that had never been cataloged before.
For the national forest maps I imported them into Sirsi, inserted a few changes that I wanted to see, 500 notes mainly, and left everything else alone.  Now, I'm assuming this will become an institution record, linked to its master, because I left the 001, 003, 007, 035 etc. etc. alone.

For the route 66 map, I downloaded a very dissimilar record from OCLC just as a template to build upon, and ended up changing every field with the exception of the 110 and a few 65x's.  I'm assuming since this map has never been cataloged before, a new record will be added to OCLC.  Is there something I need to do to force the creation of a master vs an institution record?  Is there some unforeseen way this newly created record could be linked to the original dissimilar record that I used as a template?

Are there specific marc fields that OCLC looks at, to determine how they will handle the merging/deduping process?

Thanks as always,
Rick Grapes
BYU Map Collection