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Category Archives: marc

bibliovirus

Monday, November 3, 2008

Terry’s analysis of the proposed changes to OCLC’s record policy is essential reading. I’m really concerned that these 996 fields will slip somewhat unnoticed into data that I use.

996 $aOCLCWCRUP $iUse and transfer of this record is governed by the OCLC® Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records. $uhttp://purl.org/oclc/wcrup

This appears to be an engineered, [...]

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baby steps at linking library data

Monday, May 5, 2008

Alistair wanted to have some data to demonstrate the potential of linked library data, so I quickly converted 10K MARC records (using a slightly modified version of MARC21slim2RDFDC.xsl and rewrote the subjects as lcsh.info URIs using a few lines of python…all a bit hackish, but it got this particular job done quickly.
The rewriting of [...]

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literals and resources

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

There’s a fascinating modeling discussion going on over on the DC-RDA list about whether RDA properties should reference literals or resources in descriptions. For example when describing an author you could use a literal:

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910

or a resource:

http://lccn.loc.gov/n79021164

There are some shades of gray in between (using blank nodes, auto-generated URIs, typed literals) but that’s the [...]

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pymarc PEP-8 cleanup

Thursday, February 28, 2008

pymarc v2.0 was released yesterday afternoon. I’m mentioning it here to give a big tip of the hat to Gabriel Farrell (gsf on #code4lib) who spent a significant amount of time cleaning up the code to be PEP-8 compliant.
If you are a current user of pymarc your code will most likely break, since methods [...]

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metadata hackers

Monday, December 31, 2007

I opened the paper this morning to read a story of another person involved in the creation of MARC who has just died. I hadn’t realized before reading Henrietta Avram and Samuel Snyder’s obituaries that there was a bit of an NSA LC connection when MARC was being created.

From 1964 to 1966, [Samuel Snyder] [...]

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more marcdb

Monday, November 5, 2007

This morning Clay and I were chatting about Library of Congress Subject Headings and SKOS a bit. At one point we found ourselves musing about how much reuse there is of topical subdivisions in topical headings in the LC authority file. You know how it is. Anyhow, I remembered that I’d used marcdb to [...]

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marcdb

Monday, October 1, 2007

If you are a library data wrangler at some point you’ve probably wanted to stuff MARC data into a relational database so you can do queries across it. Perhaps your $vendor supports querying like this, but perhaps not. At any rate for some work I’ve been doing I’ve really needed to be able to [...]

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pymarc, marc8 and nothingness

Friday, July 20, 2007

pymarc 1.0 went out day before yesterday with a new function: marc8_to_unicode(). When trying to leverage MARC bibliographic data in today’s networked world it is inevitable that the MARC8 character encoding will at some point rear its ugly head and make your brain hurt. The problem is that the standard character set tools for various [...]

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MARC, Perl and Unicode

Thursday, May 5, 2005

I’ve been doing some work for Texas A&M who need a MARC::Record module that is Unicode safe. Many ILS vendors are moving away from MARC-8 encoded records towards Unicode. No doubt this move is being spurred on by big players like OCLC who are moving (or have moved) their mammoth WorldCat database to Unicode.
At any [...]

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