Brooklyn Public Library purchases a large volume of World Language materials. We catalog all of this material with book-in-hand. Ordering is done with spreadsheets supplied by vendors with the title in vernacular. We wished to be able to use these spreadsheets to create short bibliographic records and attached order records so that bibliographic and financial records for the orders would be contained in our Millennium ILS.

Our lead cataloger developed a procedure to convert the data from the vendor-supplied spreadsheets and order information from our selectors into a short MARC-format bibliographic record and an order record for each title in a format that could be loaded into the Millennium system.

Our Russian vendor supplied a spreadsheet with author, title, estimated cost and publisher. Using standard Microsoft Office tools (both Excel and Word), a bibliographic record program (MarcEdit) and a standard translation program, we were able to convert the short bibliographic information, along with order quantity and distribution supplied by our selectors into a format that we could load into Millennium using a customized load table. This allowed the library to have all ordering information and financial data relating to the order in Millennium. It also allows us to create the unique order number to send to the vendor (so that they can supply that on the invoice). All encumbering and expenditure is handled in the same manner as English-language materials.

Variations on this procedure have been used with other languages to create short bibliographic records along with order records in Millennium.

This process allows financial budgeting to be maintained in Millennium, provides a short bibliographic record in the catalog – so that patrons can place holds prior to delivery, and allows the invoices to be quickly verified (by unique order number) by staff who do not read the language of the delivered materials.