Deriving MARC Holdings from Inventory Holdings

(DRAFT)

Currently, MARC Holdings records are not stored in Source Record Storage (SRS). A few libraries are interested in having MARC Holdings in SRS, but many libraries plan to rely on the less-detailed Inventory Holdings records instead. Inventory Holdings records are currently integrated with Orders and Receiving, and can be created and updated manually in Inventory or via defaulted data or data mapped from MARC Bibliographic records via Data Import.

Regardless of whether a library stores MARC Holdings in SRS or not, many libraries will need to export holdings data in MARC holdings records or as fields added to MARC Bibliographic records. 

Early plans for Data Import, SRS, and Inventory assumed that libraries storing MARC Holdings in SRS would use a default map to have those SRS MARC Holdings update the related Inventory Holdings automatically, paralleling the relationship between MARC Bib records and Inventory Instances. The final default mapping for Inventory Holdings derived from MARC Holdings records is documented on the FOLIJET Inventory Holdings from MFHD tab of this Google spreadsheet. As with the default MARC Bib-to-Inventory Instance mapping, the expectations are that 1) only libraries storing SRS MARC records would need this default mapping and 2) individual libraries would likely make local edits to the default map, to account for local practices,

Despite all of the above, another possibility for dealing with MARC Holdings data exists. Instead of storing MARC Holdings in SRS, what if 1) a library created Inventory Holdings, and 2) then FOLIO mapped the Inventory Holdings into MARC Holdings on demand, at the point that the data needed to be exported from FOLIO? In this scenario, no MARC Holdings would be stored in SRS, and the most important mapping would be from the Inventory Holdings format to the MARC Holdings format. 

The key to making that workflow possible would be confirmation that MARC Holdings data could be stored in an Inventory Holdings record and then mapped back into a MARC Holdings record without losing important details. FOLIO has some experience with this in the realm of Inventory Instances that do not have SRS MARC Bibs associated with them (Inventory source = FOLIO). For those Instances, FOLIO creates a MARC Bibliographic record on demand during export. These on-demand MARC Bibs are not stored in SRS. In that MARC Bib record, some fields such as notes, subjects, and added entries, are mapped into default fields, since they cannot be easily mapped back to their exact fields and especially their exact subfields. That would likely be the same for MARC Holdings mapped from Inventory Holdings. That said, would an on-demand MARC Holdings record created from an Inventory Holdings record be good enough? Before starting the significant development work entailed for SRS MARC Holdings, and given the limited number of libraries planning to store MARC Holdings records in SRS, this "on-demand" workflow seems like a promising one to analyze in more detail

In late 2020, Anne L. Highsmithdid some analysis of Texas A&M's MARC holdings records at the request of Ann-Marie Breaux (Deactivated). Here are links to that Slack conversation and the results.