After last week's talk on making use of the period between now and fundamental shifts in cataloging, regular expressions (regex) came up during the Q&A as one of the things I think it's helpful for catalogers to learn. Afterward, one of the attendees emailed me asking for more specific recommendations on how to learn them. I'm sharing the resources I pulled together, since I think they could be of use to more folks.
The MARC 041$a may initially seem like an important field to index for catalog faceting or collection assessment. However, its use for handling optional dubs in DVDs, Blu-rays, and streaming media may confuse patrons if we index it at face value. It may also contribute to incorrect assessments regarding the languages of material held in our collections. This post provides further context and recommendations for assessing language of the media in our catalog.
The MARC field for Incorrect ISSN has ended up taking on two very different functions. This post explores both functions and their history a little and explains why they've made automated processing of the field completely impossible.
An overview of the challenges in assigning field weights in a library catalog. This uses the example of a book about Hillbilly Elegy to explain demonstrate where challenges arise.
Handouts and exercise design from a wikidata workshop designed to introduce catalogers to how they can reuse their skills to create and update wikidata records.
On how the language of nonfiction and choices in the Dewey Decimal System's Taxonomy led me to believe in Bigfoot.
Intended for folks whose institutions may be using traject to index their MARC records and want to be able to test fields/subfields locally. It's also another way you can engage with and understand your MARC data.
A walkthrough, with screenshots, of how to register a new batch processing operation in MarcEdit 7.
A challenge we encountered in our Bento Box library discovery project: how do we write helpful, caring messages for searches with no results?