Following a period of community consultation in April and May, the Library Hub Community Advisory Board (LHCAB) has confirmed a final statement recommending the use of a standard approach to recording monograph retention commitments.
The statement takes account of comments received as follows:
- Recognition that libraries with wholly self-renewing collections may not wish to adopt the recommendation, which is relevant to those institutions expressing retention commitments in their records.
- Inclusion of some additional optional MARC subfield examples such as $n to record number of copies retained and a separate $z decision date subfield to record the date on which the retention statement was applied to the item.
- There were suggestions about the value of a standard set of terms for the $l status subfield. While the LHCAB supports this concept, we feel the development of a controlled vocabulary in this area is outside our remit. Library Hub can display whatever goes in the field, so will include in the display record any subfields we are asked to include. If the community wishes to agree on defined terms, we will happily display them.
- Further engagement with Legal Deposit Libraries will be taken forward, owing to their unique perspective in this area.
A PDF copy of the statement is available and will be accessible from the NBK Contributors’ Web Site.
We look forward to institutions beginning to adopt the recommendation, where appropriate. When we detect sufficient applications of the coding in the NBK database, we can start to develop pilot functionality in Library Hub Compare to surface the information. Your comments are welcome nbk@jisc.ac.uk.
Update March 2024: Please note that the PDF link to the copy of the statement above has been amended to the latest version.
