Question

Maybe I should ask this on AUTOCAT but....

When I find a typo or misspelling in an item's title I use "i.e." to supply the correct word and then create 2 246s. One with the title as on the item and the other with the correct spelling. I have not been doing anything other than using "i.e." and supplying the correct word when it occurs in subfield b. Is this enough?

Typos

MARC::Record

Version 2 of MARC::Record is now available.

MARC

New Platform for Catalogablog

Catalogablog has been moved to a new platform by Google. Seems to be OK. If anyone experiences any problems please let me know.

Cataloging Cultural Objects

Lately I've been skimming Cataloging Cultural Objects. So different from AACR2. We think in terms of author, title and subject access so easily. These folks are dealing with items with none of those properties. What is the title of a chair? Who is the author of that chair if the manufacturer is unknown? What is the chair about? I think every intro to cataloging course could benefit from doing a very brief comparison between CCO and AACR. The differences are enlightening.

CCO

Weeding

Lately there have been many posts in library weblogs about weeding issues. I won't comment on them. Each library is unique and must make decisions about what is best for them. However, it does give me the opportunity to point to the Weed of the Month Club. Each month for many years they examined a subject area and then gave some guidelines and pointed out some books commonly in collections that should be considered for weeding. Intended for school libraries, it can be used for public, community college and in some instances academic and special libraries. A great resource.

A book has been published based on the project Less is more : a practical guide to weeding school library collections by Donna J. Baumbach and Linda L. Miller.

Weeding

Koha in the Classroom

LibLime is providing supported hosted Koha software to LIS programs. Now the students can get in there and see how searches change if 505t is added to the title index. What is the effect of indexing series fields in title searches? This kind of hands on experience is invaluable.

They can get the MIT catalog to use as a catalog, just have to convert the MARCXML to MARC. Then convert the MARCXML version of the LC authority files, to have a nice test environment.

Koha

Social OPAC

Another bit of news that is sure to be widespread is the SOPAC by John Blyberg. Based on Drupal, he has released it as open-source. Works on III catalogs. "So what is the SOPAC? It's basically a set of social networking tools integrated into the AADL catalog. It gives users the ability to rate, review, comment-on, and tag items."

OPAC

Authority Records in MARCXML

Seen elsewhere but too pertinent not to mention, is that the LC authority file is now available in MARCXML.

Using a custom agent, we were able to harvest 6.95 million authority records using the publicly accessible interface to the Library of Congress authority files located at authorities.loc.gov.

• Retrieved records have been converted into MarcXML
• Accented characters have been converted into NFC (Composed Normal Form).
• Initial checks against authorities.loc.gov indicate that the retrieved data faithfully reflect that on the original system; however these checks are still only preliminary.

Cross checks against Classification Web have revealed some inconsistencies. For this reason, we are releasing this data for research purposes only. This data is not suitable for production use.

First seen on librarian.net

MARCXML