NC Cardinal Support and Staff Education Home → Cataloging Best Practice Standards → Appendices → Appendix H: Record Match Sets and Merge Profiles
5.8. Appendix H: Record Match Sets and Merge Profiles
Record Match Sets within NC Cardinal
We now only use two match sets in NC Cardinal — Cardinal match is the default for bibliographic record imports and Authority Match is used for authority records. All batch bibliographic record uploads must utilize Cardinal match to ensure that duplicate bibliographic records are not imported.
Merge/Overlay Profiles
Merge/overlay profiles enable you to specify which tags should be removed or preserved for existing catalog records when you import MARC records into Evergreen. NC Cardinal has established several default record match sets and merge profiles for consortium use.
In most cases, Match-Only Merge is the appropriate merge/overlay profile to batch import bib records and/or holdings. There is background code built into Evergreen that specifies that any import using the Match-Only Merge profile (or any profile with the 901c in the Replace Specification field) will import only the new holdings if there is an existing record in the database that is determined to be a match, or bring in the new record and holdings if there is not (assuming that the Import Non-Matching Records box is checked).
If you are importing e-resources, please use the EBook merge/overlay profile. This will add the 856 field and the appropriate $9 that you have added using MARCEdit (please see Batch Import E-resources page for further recommendations).
The Full Overlay profile (or any profile with the 901c in the Preserve Specifications field) should be used rarely and with caution, as it will overlay the existing record with the newly imported matching record, based on the Match Set used. It is important not to overlay a full and complete record that already exists in the NC Cardinal catalog with a vendor record of unknown quality without first evaluating the existing matching record(s). The record retained should align with NC Cardinal best practices. It is also important to compare and evaluate if there are more than one matching records, as it may also be necessary to merge and/or edit those records.
Please contact NC Cardinal team if there is a specific use case for a different merge/overlay profile.