Now that I've finished the project that flipped subfield d's and q's into their correct order and got rid of all or most of our obsolete subfield w's, I've got yet another project on the table. I realized that, even though I can't export records based on publication year, I can export them based on record creation date, which should usually be within a year or two of the publication date. With this is mind, I'm hoping to add and (where necessary) enhance contents notes in bibliographic records added to our catalog in the past five years. All of the below is being done using MARCEdit, by the way.
So far, the first step is going well. I exported the records, extracted all the ones that have 505 fields (contents notes) with " / " in them, extracted all the ones in that file that don't have 520 fields (summary, etc. notes), and globally enhanced all the 505s. However, not all of these 505s really need enhancing, and there's some potential for error in how enhancing occurred, so I'm going through the records one-by-one before reloading. This is still going a lot faster than enhancing them all individually would have gone.
I haven't had much of a chance to work on this project, because of all the end-of-semester stuff that's been happening, and because cataloging new things needs more attention right now. Still, I've looked through enough records to discover something I hadn't realized: our NetLibrary records, which I had always assumed were the highest quality ones, sometimes have contents notes that end prematurely. The contents notes might only cover half the actual contents of the book, with no indication (via the first indicator) that these fields are in any way incomplete. I'm fixing them up as I come across them, but it makes me wonder what other kinds of problems there might be that I don't know about.
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