Melvyl Catalog Maintenance: UC Berkeley Record Load into the Melvyl Catalog
By Ellen Meltzer, Manager, Information Services
The UC Berkeley Library is replacing its GLADIS/Pathfinder/Innopac systems with an Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (III) Millennium system and is renaming the catalog "OskiCat." CDL has been working intensively for several months with Ex Libris and the UCB library to ensure a smooth transition in the Melvyl Catalog from UCB’s GLADIS holdings to its III holdings. Part of this process has included the deletion of UCB’s five and a half million old records and the addition of more than six million new records into the Melvyl Catalog.
The Melvyl Catalog will be frozen between July 15 and August 30. Please advise your users that since no new records will be added during the freeze, users will not receive their usual Automatic Updates.
A suspension in Melvyl Catalog loading causes some temporary issues with Request which are usually transparent to end users. Request obtains holdings/availability via the classic Melvyl interface for all items including requests that originate from classic Melvyl, Next Generation Melvyl, UC-eLinks, and PubMed Order. Item availability comes from the campus OPAC, with the Request service checking the campus circulation server.
The database with the new UCB snapshot records in it will be switched into production on August 31. This process should be invisible to catalog users.
A full description of this complex process follows:
Due to limitations with the Ex Libris software, CDL cannot use the normal database update programs to replace UCB’s records. Instead, all 32 plus million records must be exported from the database and the existing UCB records removed. The exported records, plus the new UCB records, will be fast loaded (i.e. loaded without indexing) into a new database, and then all records will be indexed and merged. The CDL anticipates that this process will take six to seven weeks.
This activity will take place in a duplicate copy of the database on a different machine so that the intensive processing will not impact response time in the production system.
Loading will proceed more quickly in the rebuilt database if the number of records accumulated in the six to seven week maintenance period is held to a minimum. For this reason, CDL has requested that records associated with special projects be held during this time.
The following is the latest version of the schedule of activities (subject to revision) for the project:
July 15: Reload/reindex/remerge will begin in a copy of the production database.
July 15 – August 30: The loading of all campus records will be frozen in the production database.
August 31: The newly reloaded database will become the production database.
October 5: The backlog of frozen weekly files will be cleared for all campuses.
Normal loading will resume for all campuses.
CDL will provide information about any revisions to this schedule.