SOP
Jeeya S -
Hello fellow classmates! I have some exciting updates. But first, some of you have been confused on what a Marc Record is and what the fields like 520 are. As mentioned earlier, a MARC record is a machine-readable bibliographic record that contains information about an item in a library catalog (in other words, a digital version of cards that store info about a book such as title, author, genre, edition etc….). Every item (be it a physical book, digital book, audiobook, CD ect… ) has a MARC Record.
Catalogers must be fluent in MARC. Resource descriptions begin with content standards, controlled vocabularies, and classification, but they must end up being encoded for machine reading. Ideally catalogers would not have to worry about encoding the descriptions they create, and cataloging software would do it for them (but this is not the case right now). Catalogers must not only create descriptive content but also essentially hard code that content so it could be machine actionable. MARC is very similar to HTML or CSS in that it’s learning a set of tags
MARC organizes information in a catalog using numbered fields (Field tags) each with two coded indicators and sometimes coded subfields (I attached an image below).
Filtering through and mass editing these tags in a record set of perhaps 200 books/ items is the goal of my project.
Now for my exciting updates. As you know, I developed a way to mass correct common spelling errors in the 520 field of a MARC record through MarcEdit, OpenRefine, and Excel. Now, I am pleased to say that I have been writing an SOP detailing that process. An SOP is a Standard Operating Procedure which is for future reference for the librarians. It will also serve as part of my final product alongside (or within) my research paper.
I am also writing a mini SOP on fixing the Library of Congress headings in the 655 MARC fields (this process only requires MarcEdit and OpenRefine, so it is much smaller). There will be more on this process later.
