Even as an experienced OpenRefine user, I didn't know much about the API. I began investigating it when I needed to repeat operations across a large set of spreadsheets. While I found an alternative that's simpler for now, I wanted to share what I learned in case it's of interest to others.
Even though I've been a regular OpenRefine user for ages, I had never paid attention to a very important pair of buttons in the list of operations performed. As it turns out, it's extremely easy to perform a whole set of operations once and repeat it on other projects with the same data structure.
Blanking down is a great way to remove repeating rows within an OpenRefine record. But if the field's contents are the same between records, a single blank down action can wipe out rows of data you wanted to retain once in each record. You can solve this using row.record.index to add the record number to rows beforehand. This writeup contains the two transformations you'll need and a brief walkthrough on how to use them.
A deep dive into the methods I used to estimate institutional holdings for over 5000 journals in the Big Ten. I walk through steps from ensuring I had ISSNs for both print and electronic versions of a resource to the multiple methods I used for querying.
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.