Friday, January 21, 2011

Something cool - Amazon to MARC and IMDb to MARC

The Amazon to MARC converter takes information from Amazon.com book records and turns it into MARC. I don't see myself using the MARC records this produces, because the records would take so much cleanup that it might actually be easier to start from scratch, but I still think it's pretty cool. Plus, some aspects could be useful for my work: I could copy and paste summary information from here and avoid (I'm pretty sure) having to hunt down quotation marks and apostrophes that Connexion doesn't like, and I could potentially use this as a starting place for call numbers and subject headings.

The IMDb to MARC converter (prototype) takes information from IMDb and turns it into MARC records. I think this converter's output is actually even more helpful than the Amazon to MARC converter's - video recording MARC records take a lot of work, because of all the name access points and various notes. This would take care of some of that work, although there'd still be a lot of fixing and fiddling to do. I love the "verify names" feature (also present in the Amazon to MARC converter). I could see this tool being especially popular with libraries that, in order to save time, have a policy of basing video recording cataloging on container information - this would probably help them save even more time. Again, as with the Amazon to MARC converter, I probably wouldn't use the MARC records produced by the IMDb to MARC converter, but there are still certain things I could copy and paste into the records I end up using in Connexion.

UPDATE: The Amazon to MARC converter doesn't just do book records - I just had it generate a record for a DVD, VHS, and CD. The "classify" information seems to be drawn from OCLC - too bad, I was hoping it could help Tracy and Trudy in those cases where they have trouble finding OCLC records that match the Contemporary World Music records they're assigning call numbers to.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Electronic theses and dissertations

I added 115 URLs and their corresponding e-resource item records to bibliographic records for theses and dissertations today. In theory, every thesis and dissertation for which we have a bibliographic record and that is available via Proquest should now be searchable as Type: Thesis/Dissertation, Location: Online Access. Yay!

While I was at it, I also cleaned up some stray issues in the records, and added abstracts to records I was editing that did not already have them.