PLP/MCU is a software package designed to reduce the number of duplicate records in union catalogs, and additionally, provide tools for effectively dealing with duplicates and 'near-matches' in these catalogs.
PLP (Pre-Load Processor) reads a file of records that is to be loaded into the union catalog. For each record in the file, PLP sends one or more queries to the database in an attempt to determine whether that record is already present.
MCU (MARC Compare Utility) is a companion utility for viewing matching groups of records that PLP determined to be 'Possible' matches, and quickly making decisions about what to do with these records.
Each PLP query, in general, has three possible results:
With these results from PLP, the user may then:
Using sophisticated and precise rule-driven parameters, PLP is designed to prevent both duplicates and bad matches from being added to the database, while MCU is designed to make the process of human review as efficient as possible.
The purpose of PLP-processing is to ensure that there are no problems in the file–particularly in the SysId and Holdings code fields–before database matching/merging begins.
For each record in the incoming file, the following actions are performed:
PLP-Preprocessing is always the first task performed whenever PLP is run.
Also included in PLP/MCU is a module, which, for lack of a better name, we call 'Self-PLP'. Instead of searching a file against the database, Self-PLP compares all the records in a file against one another.
When matching records are found, Self-Plp performs the same basic actions as PLP:
Whereas PLP requires SQL access to an Oracle database, Self-PLP requires only a file of MARC records.
To learn more about these products, follow the links below: