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    Summon: Exporting Catalog Holdings - Uploading to Summon

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    • Product: Summon

    How do we provide catalog content to the Summon Unified Index?


    Your full library catalog can be included in the Summon Unified Index. To ensure that a complete set of your records is included in the index and kept up-to-date requires three tasks:
    • An export of your full library catalog.
    • A daily scheduled task (cron job) that exports your library catalog's updated and deleted records and sends them to the Summon servers via Managed File Transfer (MFT).
    • A quarterly export of your full library catalog.
    When opening Support cases with requests regarding your local catalog (such as mapping changes, requests for new full load, questions about updates and deletes, requests for new institutional repository/Libguide, and so forth), please set the Category to Institutional repository/Summon local content.
    All full catalog loads take between 4-6 weeks to go through our QA process and become live in the Summon index.
    While we are processing your first full load, you can send us daily updates and deletes; these will be held and processed after the full load becomes live. Or, you can batch them and send them when your catalog is live.
    Daily updates and deletes are processed and then when the Summon Index is updated, the updates and deletes go live. Important information about the index update process and timeframe is available in the Summon Index Update article.
    The quarterly export is not mandatory. However, it is helpful to us in being able to provide you with quality service. Quarterly exports are looked at by our QA catalog experts to make sure they are properly encoded and that nothing has changed. After our experts check the export, we load it into the index.
    By uploading full quarterly loads into the index, the indexing process becomes more efficient. If this task is performed quarterly, and you have a major change in your catalog, we will be able to process the new full load faster than if we had not processed a full load for many months.
    The quarterly export can be a scheduled task (a cron job) that exports your full library catalog and sends them to the Summon servers via MFT. If you use a cron job to perform quarterly exports, your cron job output report will notify you of the full export.

    Whenever you upload a full catalog load, please notify us as soon as possible. You will need to follow this process outlined here: Summon: Requesting a Full Load of Library Catalog

    When we process a new full load, we purge all of the older records and use the newer records. The updates and deletes with time stamps greater than the previous full load are processed a second time to maintain order. This means that updates will be processed against the new full load to bring your catalog and the Summon Index into sync.

    Exporting Your Records

    Many ILS systems support an export process. The records should be:

    • Exported in MARC 21 format - The file extension should be .mrc or .marc.

    • UTF-8 Encoded

    • Uploaded in binary mode, not ASCII mode

    • Batched - Do not submit separate files for each individual record. Separate files create processing issues.

    • Full - Not compressed

    Daily exports should include only what has changed in the past 24 hours.

    Do not reuse unique identifiers (bibliographic identifiers). Reusing identifiers will cause processing issues.

    Uploading Files to the Summon Unified Index

    To add, remove, and update your files to the Summon Unified Index, you will need to send the files via MFT. For more details, see Ex Libris Cloud MFT User Guide for Summon and 360 Services.

    Update Actions

    Before you begin, make sure your files are properly named using Summon's catalog file naming conventions. After you log on to the MFT server, you will have access to the following directories to upload your content:

    • full – Upload full exports into this directory.

    • updates – Upload daily updates into this directory.

    • deletes – Depending on the deletion method, upload deletions to this directory or the updates directory. For more information, see How to delete catalog records from the Summon Unified Index.

    • Date Created: 9-Feb-2014

    • Last Edited Date: 7-Sep-2023

    • Old Article Number: 8784