Friday, June 4, 2010

Pages and pages of names

For a while there, I had been working on batch loads of authority files for names in our 100 fields that WorkFlows said were unauthorized (which still leaves the 600s and 700s, and maybe 800s). I sort of stopped working on that project for a while - I think that I was working on the C's when I stopped. I thought I'd done a pretty thorough job, and then I started working on the project again. From A to C, I was able to batch load more than 2500 authority records. I think a lot of them came from e-resource records, which means every time we get batches of e-book records added to the system, the number of unauthorized headings I have to deal with just balloons. Really, I already knew that, I had just never had it demonstrated to me quite so clearly before. Oh, free MARC records. Even the best of them bloat my catalog maintenance reports.

I'll keep plugging along. Going through all the names to find the ones that shouldn't be batch loaded is annoying, though, like a word search puzzle that never ends. Luckily, I may be getting a little help with that. We'll see.

I've got my procedures for name headings pretty much figured out, but I need to take another look at the way I've been doing subject headings. Hmm.... On the plus side, I'm getting really good at doing nifty things with Find and Replace in Word.

2 comments:

  1. Oh man...you make me feel bad. Sorry about the extra work from the e-resources. If you want to show me what/how to do it, I would be happy to help.

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  2. Oh, don't feel bad! If you weren't loading e-resources, I or someone else would be, and it'd be the same thing. There's no helping this - it's just a "forever" maintenance project.

    Also, I'm so not giving you any of this project - I know you've got tons to do, too, and you'd probably be in just as much danger of getting sucked into the details of this as I tend to be. If I'm not careful, I sit down, look up, and am shocked that I just spent a couple hours looking at names.

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