11.5. Orphaned Bib ISBN Match deduplication

Last Updated 03/09/2026

Merging Orphaned Bibliographic Records with Potential Record Matches

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NC Cardinal may provide catalogers with a list of records to which their library is the only one with items attached. The list will include potential matches. Catalogers should review the list. If the records don't match, delete them from the list. Any records remaining on the lit after review will be merged by the NC Cardinal team.

What are these reports?

These reports are lists of potentially “orphaned” bibliographic records where the bib with your items on it only has items from your library and there is another bib in Cardinal that has the same ISBN number listed on it.

The information about your bib is shown in the yellow columns (with the label prefix "lib_") and the information about the other bib in Cardinal (with the label prefix "card_") is shown in the white columns, so you can compare the info of the two bib records side by side.

There are also links to the bib records in the first two columns, if you want to look at the records in the catalog. The lib_form and card_form display what the format icon is for the records.

What are we asking you to do?

At the simplest level, if you see something on one of these sheets that isn’t a match, delete that row from your spreadsheet. When you’re done, let us know you’ve reviewed the sheet and we’ll merge the records that remain, selecting the records with the highest quality as the winner.

Highlight the row by clicking on the row number (shown here in dark blue):

Hit delete:

That's all we need you to do.

Bonus: If they don’t match and shouldn’t be merged, you could also fix the issue that causes them to show up on the report, for instance the ISBN being on a record it shouldn’t be on. This will prevent them from showing up on other lists in the future, but our top goal is to use your valuable review time to identify the ones that should be merged.)

Suggestions for review:

Start by looking for instances where the titles or authors are dramatically different. Sometimes the reason they haven't been merged previously by our automated processes is that the titles are significantly different because elements of the series name are showing up in one bib, but not the other, or an author missing in one of the records, but to a human its clear they are the same thing. The other thing to watch out for is instances where one of the bibs is for a specific volume/title and the other bib is more generic and has a bunch of different volumes on it.

Once you’ve reviewed the title and author information, scroll through the information further to the right.

These are the other fields displayed and how they may help indicate if the bibs in question should or should not be merged:

008 & 264: dates of publication
- Even if the dates are different, the bibs might be candidates for merging if the content is substantially the same
024: UPC value for DVDs
- Useful to tell different versions of a DVD apart if there isn't an edition statement in the 250
250: edition statement
- Good indicator if the content is significantly different
300: physical description
- May give you clues about significant differences between the titles
700: added entries
- Can be useful to tell different versions of a movie with the same title apart, if for instance there's a remake of an old title

Some Knowledge Book resources to help you figure out if two bib records are duplicates:

Duplicate Records and Merging: And specifically Books, Audiobooks and Videos

If these bibs aren’t matches, why would they show up on the list?

There are a few reasons why two bibs that shouldn’t be merged might have the same ISBN number on them.

Sometimes an incorrect ISBN is added to a record. To see what record should have the incorrect ISBN, you can often search Worldcat or Amazon for that ISBN number. To fix this, delete the ISBN from the record it doesn't belong on
An ISBN for one edition of a title was also added to a different edition of a title with different content. This could be from a bad previous merge, or a record that was imported from an outside source. To fix this, delete the ISBN from the record it doesn't belong on
An ISBN for a single title also appears on a bib record that represents a whole series of volumes all on one bib. To fix this, change the ISBNs from 020$a to 020$z on the set, so the set and volume bibs don't look like potential matches.

Help Us Improve This Process

The information and columns we've added to these sheets is based on suggestions provided by other catalogers. If there is other information that would be useful to include in future versions of these sheets, please feel free to suggest it.

Note:At this stage, the reports only show potentially matching bibs where the format icons match. At a later stage we can investigate bibs with matching ISBNs that don’t have matching format icons, or other match points like OCLC numbers.

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