OttoEditions and the local acquisitions system

OttoEditions is designed to work in cooperation with your local acquisitions system. MARC 21 records can be loaded into your system to save you the effort of keying entire orders into your system or retrieving them from elsewhere.

If your library wants to import records from HARRASSOWITZ into the acquisitions system, you should create a download profile. To do this, login to OttoEditions with a username that has account management privileges. From the Main Menu, choose Account Management, then Create Download Profile. The procedure for filling out the download profile is described in OttoEditions Account Management.

HARRASSOWITZ can supply any of the following types of records:

MARC 21 bibliographic records for provisional or firm orders, with order information.
MARC 21 bibliographic records for approval plan selections, with invoices.
MARC 21 bibliographic records for firm orders, with invoices.
MARC 21 bibliographic records for New Title Announcements, with price quotes.
MARC 21 bibliographic records for titles selected by the library in OttoEditions, with price quotes.

You may select as many of these as you wish, in your download profile.

If your library system expects different mappings for local fields, you may specify your own field mappings when you create your download profile. Each type of record can have its own mapping.

Download schedule

HARRASSOWITZ gathers all new records that have been created since your last download, on the schedule specified in your download profile, and places them in your directory of the HARRASSOWITZ FTP site at ftp.harrassowitz.de. This takes place between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., Central European time. Use the name and password assigned to your FTP account, and you will automatically be in the correct directory. If you don't know your name and password, check with your library coordinator. If the library coordinator doesn't know it, please contact service@harrassowitz.de.

When you are through using each file, you may delete it. Files are deleted automatically after 6 months.

Regular Firm Orders

The simplest scenario for downloading orders is:

	Acquisitions staff place firm orders in OttoEditions.
	HARRASSOWITZ orders the materials from the publisher immediately.
	HARRASSOWITZ accumulates the library's orders at regular intervals and places them as MARC 21 records with order information in the library's directory on the HARRASSOWITZ FTP site.
	The library picks up the records and loads them into the local system.

Provisional Orders followed by Firm Orders

Because some local library systems require orders to carry their own assigned PO#'s, another common cycle of ordering in OttoEditions involves the following steps:

	Acquisitions staff place provisional orders, without purchase order numbers, in OttoEditions.
	HARRASSOWITZ accumulates the library's orders and places MARC 21 records with order information in the library's directory on the HARRASSOWITZ FTP site.
	The library picks up the records and loads them into the local system.
	After the system has assigned PO#'s, the library exports electronic orders in EDIFACT or X12 format, depending on the local library system.
	HARRASSOWITZ receives these orders and loads them into OttoEditions, overlaying the provisional orders, which now become firm orders.
	HARRASSOWITZ orders the books from the publisher.

Libraries may wish to follow different scenarios that are accommodated by HARRASSOWITZ.

Customizing the records for downloading

Because local acquisitions systems expect local information in different places in the MARC 21 record, HARRASSOWITZ allows you to specify how your local information is mapped to 9xx fields in the MARC 21 records. The download profile allows you to map the selector field and any of your locally-defined Library Notes to the 9xx field of your choice. The profile also allows you to further specify mapping for other local information, such as fund code, customer code, PO#, etc.

Instructions for setting up the mapping of local fields to MARC 21 fields are found at Account management: creating or modifying the download profile

Testing the downloading

When first using downloaded records, it is wise to try a small test of a few orders, to make sure they load properly into your system.