Understanding Parts in Evergreen

In Evergreen Parts are used to control the way holds work for situations where libraries split up various kinds of sets into parts that circulate separately. This includes any situation where individual items represent less than what is described in the bibliographic record.

Adding Parts to Records

The most common example is sets of DVDs. If the bibliographic record for Modern Family, Season 1 has the description 4 videodiscs and your library circulates as one item a case containing all four videodiscs, you can just attach your item and not think about parts. A title hold will work perfectly for your item because your item matches the title record. If several libraries attach to the bibliographic record and they all circulate single items containing all four DVDs, there’s not need to think about parts.

However, in NOBLE, libraries can and often do split up sets differently. If your library splits the four-DVD set into two items, Discs 1-2 and Discs 3-4, we need to use parts so a patron who wanted the 4-DVD set won’t get Discs 3-4 instead.
The first library that splits the set into Discs 1-2 and Discs 3-4 would add parts with those names to the bibliographic record and add them to their item records. Other libraries that splits up the set in the same way would also add these parts to their items. If a library comes along that splits up its items differently, perhaps Disc 1, Disc 2, Disc 3 and Disc 4, they would need to add those parts to the bibliographic record, and add them to their record.

Standards for Naming Parts

Parts should be names using the full word (not an abbreviation) for the unit, singular or plural as appropriate.
Examples: Book, Volume, Disc, Part, Box, Unit, Case, etc.

The unit should be followed by the part number as a single number or range of numbers separate by a hyphen:

Some parts may not have a unit and number, and should be entered using the name or year of the part.

Examples:

  • Book 1
  • Books 1-2
  • Discs 1-6
  • Volume 3
  • 2013 Supplement

Sometimes a part is used for circulating different formats separately.

Examples:

  • Book
  • Map
  • CD
  • CD-ROM
  • DVD
  • Blu-ray