The PromptCat Users Group held its semi-annual meeting Sunday afternoon in New Orleans during the ALA Midwinter meeting. After the group's chair, Armanda Barone of the University of California at Berkely, welcomed attendees, Robin Buser, OCLC, reviewed the new processing options available to PromptCat users. The OCLC Cataloging Label Program released in September 1997 will print the slb and sl6 formats.
Users can now receive separate files of records for approval plan titles and firm order titles.
This change allows vendors to mix approval and firm titles in one manifest and OCLC to output two files to the user. The mapping of order and item information into the OCLC-MARC bibliographic records has been improved. With local information available at the time records are loaded into a local system, order records may be created or updated and the item record may also be created. Ideally, library staff will only need to wand the bar code to check in the material. Rebecca Dean, OCLC, also made a presentation on OCLC's Bibliographic Record Notification Service.