Exporting bib records from Aleph

Created by: Gerald LangfordLast revised: February 23, 2010

First you need to create a set of Aleph records to be exported. In the Catalog module, click on the binoculars icon. Click on Browse. Search to find a set of records (e.g., author

search for “United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of Scientific and Technical Information”).

Highlight the entry (or entries) for the records that you want to be part of the record set.Click on “Save As Set”

Give your set a name (e.g., “OSTI_sample”) Click “OK” You have now saved the set of records to your computer.

To save the set on the Aleph server, highlight the set in the list of sets that appears. Click on Save. Give the set a name (e.g., OSTI_SAMPL). Notice that Aleph

automatically upper cases the letters in the file name and that there is a limit to the length of the file name. (e.g., could not add “E” to “SAMPL” in the file name.) Click “OK”

Another option for creating a set of Aleph records. In the Catalog module, click on the binoculars icon. Click on Find. Click on tab 2 (Multi-base CCL search). Do a keyword

search (e.g., wau=obama barack and wyr=2009). Click OK.

Since the list of sets is already displaying, we can save the set of records directly to the Aleph server. Click on Save. Give the set a name (e.g., BARACK1). Click on OK.

To download records, go to Services, then Retrieve Catalog Records, then Download Machine Readable Records (print-03)

Fill in the print-03 form as follows. Input file: Put name of your set (does NOT have to be in caps; e.g., osti_sampl). Output file: use a name that differs from the input file (e.g.,

osti_sampl.out) Field 1: ALL Format: MARC Character Conversion: UTF_TO_MARC8MAKE SURE “Add to History” is CHECKED and “Print to ADM Lib” is UNCHECKED.

Dialog box with text “Job was submitted to queue” should appear if there are no problems. Click OK.

To retrieve the set of records, go to http://uf.aleph.fcla.edu/SClick on the here link

Type in your Aleph user name and password. Click OK. (If using Firefox and if the “User name” dialog box doesn’t appear, you may have to allow popups from the website.)

Click on View/Download Files.

Click on ufu01/scratch

The file of records should be near the top of the list. It will have the name you gave the output file when running the print-03 service (e.g., osti_sampl.out) To download the file to

your computer, you can right click on the link to the file and then left click on “Save Link As…” Or you can click on the Download button to the right of the link.

Here is a view, using Notepad, of a file of Aleph records exported in MARC format. (Each record begins with a string consisting almost completely of numbers. In this view the

end of a record is signaled by two rectangles.)

A final note on exporting a large set of records

• If you are trying to export more than a few hundred records, please use the Aleph Report client, not the Production client. This is

particularly true if you use the ret-01 Aleph Service to create a set of records to be downloaded.