School vacations and more...

School librarians please take note: as the academic year winds down, please remember to tell NHAIS Services if you will not be responding to requests in the NHAIS ILL System during the summer. We'll set your account so new requests won't be routed to your location during your vacation. This helps move requests along to active libraries, rather than letting them sit around waiting and waiting for a closed library to respond.

Contact the NHAIS Help Desk with your vacation information (library name, first and last dates you won't be responding to ILL) via e-mail or call 603-271-2141.

If your school's calendar for 2026-27 is already fixed, you can submit vacation dates for the entire school year now--there's no need to wait. Fill out the School Closed Dates form and send it to NHAIS Services.

You may get curious about other things in the Participant Record while you're on that page. For an explanation of what it all means, see a 2022 NHAIS Notes post. 

   

The NHAIS ILL System will be offline briefly starting at 10 o'clock tonight (Tuesday, May 12) to install a software update. The blog message you see above the Staff Dashboard page will now also appear on the Request Manager page.

   

URIs may sometimes be added to MARC fields without subfield coding (for example, in parentheses or after a dash to indicate a source of data in a note field). However, when URIs are separately coded, they are used in only a few subfields (For a fuller explanation, see https://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/controlsubfields.html):

$u Uniform Resource Identifier: The URI in this subfield may link to an electronic version of the resource described in the record or to any electronic resource that’s related in some way to what’s described in the record.

$0 Authority record control number or standard number: This subfield may contain numbers or text, in addition to URIs. A URI used in $0 will link to a description (like an authority record) of the name or label used in the MARC field.

$1 Real World Object URI: The idea of “Real World Object” (RWO) is new in the library world. Despite the use of the word “object” in this phrase, it also refers to entities that we wouldn’t typically think of as objects, such as people or concepts. A URI used in this subfield points to a description of an entity, rather than a description of a name or label (as a URI used in a $0 would).

$4 Relationship: The subfield $4 has been used for a while in cataloging to carry relationship/relator codes that indicate the relationship of the entity entered in a MARC field to what is being described by the MARC record (Ex. “aut” for “author”). Now, URIs may also be entered in the subfield $4, linking to records that provide further information about these codes.

URIs may also be used to describe “data provenance” in the following subfields: $e, $l, $y, $7. The MARC field being used will determine which subfield is used for data provenance (Remember to consult MARC documentation when choosing a subfield to use). Text may be used in these fields in addition to or instead of URIs. If both text and URIs are used, they are entered in separate subfields (Ex. text in one $7, URI in a separate $7).

   

The Lakes Region (LR) ILL van delivery is cancelled for Friday, May 1. Affected libraries are as follows:

NH State Prison, Concord
Hill
Bristol
Meredith
Center Harbor
Moultonborough
Wolfeboro
Alton
Gilford
Laconia
Sanbornton

Thank you,
Jennifer M. Finch (she/her)
Reference Librarian and State Data Coordinator
New Hampshire State Library 

   

This is the first in a series of seven weekly blog posts written by Zahra Gordon which will explain “Linked Data,” an emerging topic in the library field, and how it relates to “Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs),” which are appearing in the subfields of MARC records with increasing frequency.

 There’s been a lot of talk in the library community (especially the library cataloging community) lately about “linked data.” Linked data is “a set of best practices for publishing structured data on the Web” (https://www.w3.org/wiki/LinkedData). Simply put, linked data uses links to structure information in a way that makes it more readable by computers.

Why is this important to libraries? The idea is that using links to make library data more readable by computers will make it findable by automated tools outside of the library catalog and connect it to other sources of information outside of the catalog. So, people searching outside of the catalog can find our resources more easily, and we can more easily find further information about our resources that’s located elsewhere.

In catalog records, these links take the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), defined as “unique sequences of characters that identify abstract or physical resources” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier). The Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that we’ve added to our records for years (often in subfield $u of MARC field 856) are a type of URI.

URIs are increasingly being added to fields and subfields in MARC records and are just a preliminary step in turning library data into linked data. Eventually, the idea is that MARC will be replaced by tools and models such as BIBFRAME that allow library data to be entirely created and edited according to linked data principles.

Zahra Gordon is the Cataloger at the New Hampshire State Library. Before coming to the State Library, she worked as a cataloger for a contract cataloging agency serving government libraries in the Washington Metropolitan Area and then for YBP Library Services (now GOBI Library Solutions) in Contoocook, New Hampshire.