OCLC has recently completed a major reload of records from the National
Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) distributed by the
Library of Congress.  There were two goals in doing this load.  First,
OCLC had not loaded these records in a number of years and we wanted to
fill in the gaps in WorldCat.  Second, when we had loaded them in the
past, many records were truncated because of OCLC's limitations on
record size.  Now that those size limits no longer apply, we wanted to
restore the records to their full content.

It's become clear over the past few days that, for some records that
were already in WorldCat, the loading process did not adequately protect
records for which the WorldCat version was more recent and more complete
than the record as distributed by LC.  OCLC staff are currently working
on identifying the cases in which this happened so that the previous
version of the record can be restored.  We have put loads of the weekly
NUCMC files on hold until we can resolve the issues surrounding
protecting these updated records.

For those OCLC member libraries who have been updating the NUCMC records
in WorldCat that represent their institution's collections, we ask that
you NOT update any records until OCLC staff have restored the earlier
versions of the records.  If you make changes to the current version of
the records, that will complicate the process of restoring the earlier
versions.  We will announce when you can resume updating records online.

We apologize for the difficulties we have caused and we thank you in
advance for your patience while we resolve the situation.

Glenn Patton
Director, WorldCat Quality Management
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
6565 Frantz Rd.
Dublin  OH  43017-3395
Phone: +1.800.848.5878, ext. 6371 or +1.614.764.6371
Fax: +1.614.718.7187
Email: mailto:[log in to unmask] 


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