Bloomsbury: transition from MARC to KBART title lists for KB updates

• Product: Alma CZ, 360 KB, SFX KB
• Product Version: all
• Relevant for Installation Type: all

In December 2023, Ex Libris switched file formats from Bloomsbury for the updating of Ex Libris KBs (Alma CZ, 360 KB from MARC to KBART files for the generic collection:

This change unintentionally caused many mis-matches between Titles/objects and their individual holdings/portfolios. Due to the way that title activations in selectable collections are handled, this may have caused titles that libraries had previously selected to appear to have been removed from the collection. These titles are available in the collection, but the KB recognized the update as a "delete" and an "add" instead of as a "change" as it should have, because of the differences in ISBN types that Ex Libris extracted from the MARC vs. what is offered in the KBART file.

If you notice that a previously selected title appears to have been removed, check to see whether the title is actually available in the collection.

We have been working to match the titles together again to resolve this issue, and apologize for any inconvenience.

We will be making a similar change from MARC files to KBART files for other Bloomsbury ebook collections in the coming months. Theoretically, the change to the "All Titles" collection and our resulting work to re-match titles together means that the change to the smaller ebook collections should be much smoother (the "damage" was already done and fixed). However, we will be closely monitoring the change to make sure that we do not have a repeat of this incident.

Note that the change from MARC files to KBART files for KB ingestion does not affect MARC enrichment in Alma CZ or title normalization in 360 KB. Ex Libris catalogers still use Bloomsbury MARC records for this purpose.

• Article last edited: 06-Mar-2024