Videos

I've noticed a lot of records, some in my catalog, that still have the note "Closed-captioned for the hearing impared." That was changed in 1998 to just "Closed-captioned." Also this is a language note and so belongs in field 546, not 500. In our catalogs there should be a way to do a global change and fix the note. Not sure if that is possible in OCLC and RLIN.

MARC

The updated proposals and discussion paper from the ALA Annual 2004 meetings of the MARC Advisory Committee are now available from the MARC 21 Web site. They include a brief review of the discussion and status of each paper.

The updated papers are located at:

• Proposal No. 2004-05 Changes Needed to Accommodate RISM Data--Music Incipits
• Proposal No. 2004-06 Defining the First Indicator and New Subfields in Field 017 to Suppress Display Labels in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal No. 2004-07 Applying Field 752 (Added Entry - Hierarchical Place Name) for Different Purposes in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal No. 2004-08 Changing the MARC-8 to UCS Mapping for the Halves of Doublewide Diacritics from the Unicode/UCS Half Diacritic Characters to the Unicode/UCS Doublewide Diacritic Characters
• Discussion Paper 2004-DP04 Use of ISBNs and LCCNs in MARC 21 Bibliographic Records

Writing

Writing for the Profession by Rachel Singer Gordon appears in the latest FreePint

Many information professionals, understandably busy with both day-to-day responsibilities and keeping up with our rapidly-changing field, may feel overwhelmed by the idea of making original contributions to the profession. One of the best ways to remain current and connected, however, is by taking the time to contribute through writing for publication. Our research and writing activities also allow us to engage in the time-honored library tradition of sharing information with others -- only, in this case, with our colleagues. Writing for the library literature allows us to stretch our minds and to think about our profession and where it is headed. it allows us to contribute to our ongoing professional conversation, which in turn helps define the underpinnings of our field.

ISBN Checking

A few days ago I asked about batch checking the validity of ISBNs. I got a few comments giving some solutions. Another solution came by e-mail. I have received permission to post it, so that anyone else interested in an answer can benefit.

I saw the above posted on your Catalogablog site. As you may have seen in my postings on Autocat, Perl4Lib or one of the other lists, I have been writing a number of error checking subroutines in Perl, similar to the checks performed by MARC::Lint in the MARC::Record distribution.

One of the subroutines, check_020, in my MARC::Lintadditions module [1] may be of assistance. Business::ISBN could be used to take care of mass-ISBN checking, without my modules, see the subroutine check_020 in Lintadditions.

I have a script, lintwithadditionsselective.pl [2] that should be able to be easily adapted to check only 020s, though I haven't had time to test that yet. I've been running the whole lintallchecks.pl [3] set of error checks (which uses both Lintadditions.pm (for single-field checking, in the same way as MARC::Lint), and Errorchecks.pm (MARC::Errorchecks.pm) [1].

Requirements: Perl. MARC::Record, Business::ISBN, Business::ISSN (from CPAN). All of my modules and scripts rely upon my MARC::BBMARC module [1].

My scripts [2 and 3] rely upon a stand-alone file of raw MARC records, but the checking functions (for Lintadditions, anyway) should work the same as MARC::Lint.

Installation: I haven't had time to develop an automated installation process. I have been simply placing my modules in the same directory as Record.pm from MARC::Record (in Perl/site/lib/MARC/).

See my Web pages for more information.

1. My Lintadditions.pm (as well as Errorchecks.pm and BBMARC modules)
2. Selective Lintadditions checks
3. Lint all checks

Please let me know if this was unclear. Hope this helps,

Bryan Baldus
Cataloger (Quality Books Inc.)

Graphic Novels

Over the weekend I thought of a few more that should be on my list, this makes it over the 11 items but I can't think of any to drop. So here are a few more to consider:

• Unshelved
• Power of Shazam