How to Load MARC Records for ProQuest Congressional

ProQuest posts monthly updates for their ProQuest Congressional record sets. There are many collections that fall within the ProQuestion Congressional platform, and these notifications are not institution-specific so you first have to determine which collections the libraries license so that you know which records to load for each.

Notifications are sent each month to the Congressional Listserv at CONGRESSIONAL@listserv.proquest.com. We are subscribed to the listserv under the address libraries@ohio5.org so when a new notification hits that address, a task is automatically created in Asana.

Once a new notification is posted:

  1. For each collection that has been updated (as noted in the email from ProQuest), determine which libraries, if any, license those collections. We maintain a spreadsheet of each collection along with notes about which libraries subscribe. This is based on the libraries' knowledge bases, but it should be periodically reviewed by each library to confirm.
  2. Login to the ProQuest Congressional FTP site to retrieve the updated files
  3. For each file, open in MarcEdit.
  4. There are a few changes needed to the MARC files:
    1. Add the EZProxy prefix to any 856 links for each library with access to the collection
    2. Add a 949 $l field with the institution code for each subscribing library (den, ken, owu, woo)
    3. In some cases, there are hearing identifiers. These can be merged with the 856 $u field so that when there are multiple links, they can be distinguished by their identifiers.
    4. Add a 910 $a field with an identifier that identifies this specific MARC file (e.g. pq-chdc-l-20191121)
  5. In Sierra, go to Data Exchange
  6. Select "Load records via locally-created load profiles"
  7. Click on Get PC
  8. Browse to the location of the MARC file you are loading
  9. Select the file and click Upload
  10. When prompted to rename the file, change the extension to .lfts
  11. Click OK. The file will be uploaded to Sierra.
  12. Select the file and click Prep.
  13. Click Start.
  14. Once the Prep phase completes, click Close. A new file with the .lmarc extension will appear beside the .lfts file.
  15. Select the .lmarc file and click Load
  16. Select "Load a PQ CON file" option from the list of actions
  17. Click Test to confirm that everything appears as though it will load properly.
  18. (Optional) In the Maximum records to load field, enter 1 and click Load. This will allow you to load one record and then view it to make sure the data looks as you expect. If everything checks out, return to Data Exchange and set the Maximum records to load field back to 1000000
  19. Once everything looks good, click Load.
  20. Add the file to the CONSORT Record Loads log