I emailed the MarcEdit listserv for advice and now have a regular expression that I can modify that will hopefully be able to take care of a large chunk of the "smooshed" fields in our older records. Very, very nice, plus I plan on taking this regular expression apart as part of a project to learn more about MarcEdit's regular expressions. I've used regular expressions in Microsoft Word (they're called wildcards there) and have done some nifty things, so I'm excited about the prospect of learning how to do similar things in MarcEdit.
Now I just have to carve out the time for all of that "playing." All the webinars last week and the time I spent figuring out how to globally change the type on our thesis and dissertation records lost me most of the small lead I managed to gain over the Processing students, so it may be a while before I'll have the time to do a lot.
Forget keeping up with the processing students! YEAH to fixin the smooshed heading! I want to help if i needed!!!!
ReplyDeleteBe sure and keep a count of the number you do in batch so that we can report it on the annual report.
I got another email from someone on the listserv with a more refined (and potentially less time-consuming to use) regular expression - I REALLY want to try it out! Right now, I've got a file of 5 records that contain smooshing. The original regular expression I was sent works fine (I tested it, and the fields separated like magic), but it needs to be run multiple times for each affected field. The new one supposedly needs to only be run once for each field - crossing my fingers that that one works the way the submitter thinks it should. I don't know if MarcEdit will tell me the number of records that my regular expression edited, but I'll at least be able to record how many access points (6xx, 7xx, etc.) we had before and how many we'll have after.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the Processing students go, they're still at the point where, if I don't have a pile of cataloged books ready for them, they don't have work to do. I think Sharon has started to teach them how to mend, which will help a lot.
...and I've got a winner - the second regular expression suggestion I was given on the listserv works even better than the first. I have to make far fewer edits to it and most of the work involves pressing the "Replace All" button until 0 modifications are made. I think this is going to be my new ref desk project.
ReplyDelete