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OCLC Support

About OCLC Connexion cataloging

Find an overview of Connexion client cataloging functionality.

Connexion availability

OCLC Connexion is available 24 hours, Monday through Sunday.

 Note: OCLC occasionally conducts maintenance on the system, most usually on Sundays from 2 am to 6 am U.S. Eastern Time. OCLC usually provides advance notice about these maintenance periods via listserv messages and on the OCLC System Status dashboard.

WorldCat search methods

  • Numeric search (using keyword number indexes)
  • Derived search (segments derived from words in a name or title separated by commas)
  • Keyword search (word and phrase indexes)
  • The above search types combined and qualified
  • Browse queries (scan a word or phrase index for a character-by-character match or the closest match)

Record size

  • Bibliographic records must meet size limits defined in MARC21 standards. The number of characters in a field cannot exceed 9,999. The number of characters in a record cannot exceed 99,999. These limits apply to records  you catalog using Connexion and to those provided by the OCLC Cataloging and Metadata Subscription.
  • For other offline services that output records, record size is restricted to 50 variable fields and 4096 characters. Records may be truncated for the output records only. Connexion retains the full-length record.

Non-Latin scripts

The Connexion client supports using these non-Latin scripts for cataloging: Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Syriac, Tamil, and Thai.

See International cataloging for more information.

OCLC Cataloging and Metadata Subscription

The following actions generate an archive transaction in the OCLC Cataloging archive–Update Holdings, Produce and Update Holdings, Alternate Produce and Update, Delete Holdings, Replace Record, and Replace and Update Holdings. OCLC Connexion transactions are processed daily to provide various offline products.

Accessions Lists service

Records processed with the Produce and Update Holdings or Alternate Produce and Update action via Connexion are included in Accessions Lists, an OCLC service you subscribe to separately from Connexion.

In the Connexion client itself, you can print accessions lists using records in the local save file. You can set options, create the content, and print reports to a printer or to an HTML file.