Hello SWAN membership --

With the recent Symphony upgrade came a change to the way bibliographic fixed fields display in Symphony. A new field called "Rec_Status" appears in the upper left-hand corner of the fixed field. It displays a Record Status value from OCLC indicating whether a record is new, pre-publication, deleted, or updated.

The field can be manually edited, but it will not update when records are changed, so even a "new" record may have been updated numerous times in our system. We do not recommend using this field to determine the quality of editing history of a record.

The introduction of this field has also shifted all fixed field elements to the right. We have spoken with SirsiDynix, and there is no way to move, hide, or lock this new field, so the new arrangement is here to stay. For many of you creating pre-cats, this means the Fiction fixed field has been moved to the right. Please be aware of the new arrangement as your create and edit records.