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This afternoon, Carolyn, Patty, Lauren C. and I viewed an OCLC webinar on provider neutral eBook records. Many of you are probably asking, what are provider neutral eBook records? Well, currently, catalog records for eBooks specify which provider or publisher has created a given “copy” of an eBook. If the same book is published in electronic form by multiple providers, there is a different record for each provider, because each version is considered a different edition. As you can imagine, this causes a proliferation of records for what is essentially only one book, and creates a good deal of confusion for catalogers, not to mention patrons. So, in order to simplify this process, OCLC advocates creating eBook records that are “neutral” (that is, provide no information) about the provider. In January, OCLC will begin running a series of macros to convert their eBook bib records to the provider-neutral style, which will be followed by clean-up projects to convert those records that are not fixed by the macros. OCLC also plans to begin aggressively deleting duplicate records for eBooks from their database, in order to keep a clean, single, neutral record for every eBook title. The session ended with the presentation of two helpful links, one for a pdf of the OCLC report on provider neutral records that came out in July, and the other for a pdf of guide to creating provider neutral records. If you have any questions, or just like to be bored silly by cataloging talk, feel free to ask me about this webinar.