At 10:02 AM 11/6/2006, Diana Miles wrote:
>1. the standard of these bibliographic records and the impact on the
>catalogue in terms of authority control, consistency of headings, etc.
The standard varies widely: some are perfectly lovely and ostensibly
complete records with good headings and so on; and others are
no-hopers that use no recognized character set. (Most records are
somewhere in between these extremes.)
>4. how, once loaded into the catalogue, the records for items within
>individual collections are managed (additions, deletions, substitutions)
>5. managing the updating/deletion of records when an entire package is
>discontinued
Each record we load from a set bears a marker in an 035
field. (There's additional stuff in the locally-defined 948
field.) This 035 typically consists of a unique code for the record
set, the name of the input file, and the sequential position of the
record within the file. For example:
SerSol Brief-NorthwesternUniv_MARC_2006_10_19.mrc 00001471
(The unique code is the important bit; the other stuff is just there
for show.) Any updates to a record set are applied only against
other records from that set. For example, if we're loading NetLibrary
updates, the loader ignores any matching records that aren't
previously-loaded NetLibrary records. Having this unambiguous marker
also makes it relatively simple to pull all of the records. (Just
did that the other week for something like 25,000 records.)
Gary L. Strawn, Authorities Librarian, etc.
Northwestern University, 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston IL 60208-2300
e-mail: [log in to unmask] voice: 847/491-2788 fax: 847/491-8306
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
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