• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
One of our libraries is negotiating with ProQuest on a purchase of approximately 103,000 records for Early English Books Online (EEBO) records. This library already contains 69,283 EEBO records. The new file will contain both updates to the existing records and new records. The problem is that there's no unique number consistently present in the bibs that can be used for match/overlay. The vendor recommends deleting the existing records and reloading all the records as new.

I suspect the existing EEBO records are loaded in a single system number range. Will it cause any problems if a span of 69,283 records are deleted? (This question also comes up with Serials Solutions loads - brief records have to be deleted before a new load because there's no number that can be used for match/overlay.)

Resolution:
If there were associated items (with loans, requests, etc.), such a deletion of bib records could be problematic, but since these EEBO records are for ebooks -- with no associated items -- there in no special problem with this.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013