Inside Aleph: what the holdings lines hide
A single line such as “BOOK MPMPT BIB F 759 8660 01 20181115” holds almost an item’s entire life. We take it apart — and explain what it can’t tell you without a librarian.
The Aleph catalogue export delivers item data as short lines. To a program it is just text. To build item management, we had to parse it.
The line, piece by piece
Take the line BOOK MPMPT BIB F 759 8660 01 20181115:
- BOOK — material type. SERIE, ISSBD (a bound journal volume) and ARTKL (article) also occur.
- MPMPT — the sub-library.
- BIB — the collection code. It may be missing.
- F 759 — the call number.
- 8660 — the item’s accession number.
- 01 — a status code.
- 20181115 — a date in YYYYMMDD format.
Where the difficulties begin
The collection code is sometimes missing. Then the call number follows the sub-library directly, and the program has to realise that “F” is no longer a collection. 1,862 items — almost a third — are recorded this way.
The status codes are unexplained. We see 01, 02, 04, 09, but what each means is known only to whoever configured Aleph. We didn’t guess: in the new system, item statuses are defined from scratch in plain words.
The dates tell the story of the catalogue. Most items are dated 2001, 2006 and 2007: 1,870, 1,464 and 1,182 respectively. Most likely these are not years of acquisition but years of retrospective conversion, when the card catalogue was moved into the electronic one. That is why “Recent additions” in Katlog honestly shows the date the item record was created, not the acquisition date.
Some codes occur only a handful of times. The collections EBN, EBJ, EBB and EBS contain only a few items each. What lies behind them can’t be determined from the export alone.
- Export of the open MPT01 catalogue, 25 September 2026; author’s own counts