Re: Duplicate OCLC downloads

[Angela Kroeger <akroeger@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello!

On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Cheryl Armstrong wrote:
> We have been experiencing duplicate OCLC downloads in the past month or 
> so at all three of our cataloging PCs. 
--snip--
> Is anyone out there experiencing this duplication?  Has anyone in the past?

We haven't had this problem recently, but we had it a couple of years ago.
I can't quite remember all the details, but it would occur occasionally on
all machines, and nearly all the time on certain machines.  Innovative
would tell us it was OCLC's fault, and OCLC would tell us it was
Innovative's fault.  So basically, no one knew what was going on.

As it happened, the "fault" was with both systems and they way they
communicated.  Our best assessment of it was that when the cataloger
exported the record, OCLC would send it, our Innopac would lag on
responding with the "I got it" code, so OCLC would think it hadn't gone
through and send it again.  So we'd end up with multiple item records
with the same barcode attached to a bib (our 949 overlays the temporary
bib which has the order record, and creates an item record with a barcode
for the book).  Some days, this only happened once or twice.  Some days,
it happened on nearly 50% of records exported on the "problem" machine
of the day.  Usually it just doubled, but once in a while we'd even have
triples or quads.  And once (and fortunately only once) we got eleven
copies of an authority record!  The problem went on intermittantly for
many months, and we just deleted the duplicate records as they occured (if
you watch the export status box closely, you can tell when it's
happening).

The problem was never really "solved."  It just tapered off and went away
on its own as mysteriously as it started.  If it started happening again,
we still wouldn't know how to fix it.

Setting retries to zero in your Gateway export settings sure can't hurt,
but I don't know if it would help either, because ours were set as zero on
all machines throughout our entire bout with the problem.  It kept trying
anyway.

I'm sorry I don't really have a solution ot offer.  Good luck!

--Angela

=========================================================================
Angela Kroeger                   |  Do not cry because roses have thorns.
UNOmaha Library, Cataloging      |  Celebrate because thorns have roses.
akroeger@xxxxxxxxxx  |               @--->-----
=========================================================================

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