New Service in Review: Three years and growing

In January 2017, MARCIVE announced Comprehensive Notification Service, or CNS. This was spearheaded by our former Director of Bibliographic and Authority Services, Mary Mastraccio, after years of identifying deficiencies in maintaining only the authority files for libraries.  This has been a challenging undertaking; involving most staff members and partner libraries.  We have received great feedback from customers that we used to create additional options to make the service as flexible and user-friendly as possible.

Fun CNS Facts (as of December 2019):

  •  We have 45+ customers
  •  Roughly half of the libraries are academics and half publics, plus 3 school libraries, and a government library
  • 13 different library systems are represented
  • Semi-annually update frequency is the most popular one, followed by yearly update
  • The smallest backfile had 36,021 bib records, and the largest to date had 5,904,972 initial bib records

MARCIVE receives commonly-asked questions and has created a FAQ sheet to be provided to new CNS customers.  A question that cannot readily be answered is how many records your library will receive at an update.  Since CNS has three scheduling options:  annually, semi-annually and quarterly, the amount of records that reflect changes naturally goes up the more time has passed. But other cataloging updates from PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging), large changes from the Library of Congress (RDA changes, for example), or changes to profile specifications (e.g. examining FAST terms), or MARCIVE upgrades (like fine-tuning our genre processing) can have an impact.  Broadly speaking, a CNS customer can expect to receive 5-15% changed bib records with each scheduled update.

The most exciting aspect of Comprehensive Notification Service is the ability for libraries to receive bibliographic record updates as a subscription, ensuring the catalog is always as current as possible. Another important thing to note is the flexibility in choosing options.  For example, your library may not be interested in adding identifiers to the records currently (Subfield 0 URI or control number), but can choose to add the option at a later update, without having to plan or allocate funding for a stand-alone catalog enhancement.

Just signed up for CNS and have questions?  Start here with this document.

Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] for a consultation on our services.

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