The library must be situated in Belgium. Libraries situated outside Belgium but falling under the authority of a Belgian organisation can also participate (e.g. library of the Academia Belgica in Rome).

UniCat focuses on the following library types:

• National libraries
• Academic libraries (universities, colleges, schools for higher education)
• Scientific libraries (research centers)
• Special libraries
• Documentation centers
• Heritage libraries
• Museum libraries
• Corporate libraries
• Religious libraries

Each participating library has to sign a license and service agreement with SemperTool, the UniCat service provider.

Each participating institution pays a service and handling fee based on the number of records supplied. Please contact the UniCat project for further information. The service provider SemperTool will send invoices directly to the participating libraries.

• MARCXML

  Records are to be supplied in MARCXML and UTF-8. Exceptions are possible and are to be discussed with SempterTool directly. This may lead to higher costs.

• Tag 852

  Tag 852 (repeatable) is to be supplied using the Antilope model, that is

  • subfield a : institution
  • subfield b : collection identifier
  • subfield c : call number
  • subfield 3 : journal holding
  • subfield 9: Impala ILL identifier . This field is used for the link between UniCat and Impala. It should only be supplied if your library participates in Impala. List of valid Impala acronyms can be found at http://anet.be/antilope/acronyms.csv.

• Tag 919

  Tag 919 (repeatable) contains the identifier of the institution holding the document. 1 field per institution is sufficient. These identifiers should also be registered by the Unicat Administrator in the UniCat ADMIN database.

  This identifier is used for the availability link and for the facet on institution.

• Tag 920

  Tag 920 (repeatable) contains the resource type. This tag should contain one of the following values:

  • book
  • periodical
  • map
  • digital
  • audio
  • dissertation
  • object
  • image
  • film
  • article

• Deep link to local OPAC

  The UniCat search result will provide a direct deep link to the individual record in the local OPAC. Participating institutions must be able to deep link directly to an individual record through http. The link specification is maintained by the UniCat Administrator in the UniCat ADMIN database.

• Link resolver

  If your institution uses a link resolver, the resolver specifications should be added to the UniCat ADMIN database by the UniCat Administrator.

• FTP

  Records should be transferred to the UniCat FTP-server on a regular basis preferably weekly. All files will automatically on a daily/weekly basis be moved out from the ftp server and get processed. Add the date as a part of the file name. Add the word deletes in case of deletion. Examples:

  • unicat.20101222.completedump.xml
  • unicat01.20101222.xml
  • unicat02.20101222.xml
  • ugent4unicat.20110207.1
  • ugent4unicat.20110207.2
  • unicat.20110202.deletes.xml

  Records to be deleted from UniCat can be supplied in a separate XM file (e.g. unicat.20110202.deletes.xml) where each deleted record can be supplied as given in the example below.

  <record>
  <leader>00000dam  2200000   4500</leader>
  <controlfield tag="001">417862</controlfield>
  </record>
  

• Communication

  Member libraries will be added to the UniCat mailing list, which is used for internal communication.