eginning March 1, 2001, CATFILEplus will be available to interested licensees for pick-up via ftp on a monthly basis. CATFILEplus is a new product added to NLM's suite of bibliographic records for books, serials, audiovisuals, and other resources available in the MARC 21 format at no cost to licensees. The new data distribution includes NLM cataloging records, as well as monographs and monograph chapter records created by contributing special producers in the fields of bioethics, health technology assessment, history of medicine, population studies, and space. This data distribution replaces the distribution of monographs and chapter records previously found in BIOETHICSLINE, HealthSTAR, HISTLINE, POPLINE and SPACELINE.

With the advent of CATFILEplus, records from all special producers are integrated with NLM cataloging records created or maintained in the same time frame and distributed as a single product. The MARC 998 and MARC 999 fields carry data pertaining to the creator of the monographic record. The 998 field is multiply-occurring so that a record 'owned' by two or more producers contains appropriate 998 tagging for each producer. The record may or may not be shared with NLM. Shared records are tagged as either cataloged and "authorized" bibliographic records, which are identifiable by the value "AUTH" in the NLM locally-defined MARC 21 field 999, or as bibliographic records for forthcoming publications containing cataloging-in-publication (CIP) data, identifiable by the value "CIP" in the NLM locally-defined MARC 21 field 999.

CATFILEplus is made available to licensees to ftp on a monthly basis. All records that were completed by NLM ("AUTHorized for distribution"), those with cataloging-in-publication information (CIP) data, all records substantially revised by NLM, as well as all records released by the special producer organizations or substantially revised by them will be included in the monthly CATFILEplus distribution. The average number of records in the CATFILEplus monthly distribution is estimated to range from 4,000-6,000 records. In addition, the backfile of slightly more than 1,000,000 records will be available to licensees, if desired.

A major difference from the standard weekly CATFILE distribution is that subject headings in CATFILEplus are not recombined into the traditional subject heading string generally found in library catalogs (main heading - topical heading - form subheading - language subheading). Subject headings are distributed in separate fields as they are stored in LocatorPlus, NLM's online public access catalog, specifically in MARC 21 fields 650, 651, 655 and the NLM locally-defined field 659. For additional information on the format of NLM subject headings in LocatorPlus, see Application of MeSH for Medical Catalogers. See the Web page Leasing Data from the National Library of Medicine for more information on NLM's leased data program.

By Alice E. Jacobs
Technical Services Division

Jacobs AE. NLM Leases CATFILEplus. NLM Tech Bull. 2001 Jan-Feb;(318):e5.