Library Cataloging
Seymour Lubetzky asked "Is This Rule Necessary?". Now a study is being done asking "Is this field necessary?" The MARC Content Designation Utilization study is examing just what fields are being used. This could inform decisions on what fields to include in a Core Record, what fields to include in MODS. When we went from cards to computers we carried over the card into a new format. Now as we are moving from MARC to FRBR and MARCXML we should not continue to carry over unnecessary fields and practices. This study will provide an empirical basis for those and many other decisions.
- Marc @ Ala
Announcement for a presentation at ALA that sounds very interesting.Did you know that catalogers use only 10-20% of available MARC fields/subfields? Given evolving search behaviors and the amazoogle effects do our bibliographic records provide information...
- Marc Content Designation Utilization Project
The MARC Content Designation Utilization (MCDU) Project is now making available the first set of results from analyses of the MCDU dataset of more than 56 million MARC bibliographic records from OCLC's WorldCat database. Separate data reports containing...
- Marc Field Usage
A few days ago I mentioned the UNT MARC study of field usage in MARC records. It seems a similar study was done in 1997 in Germany. They found 33 elements that appeared in more than 1% of the records. Only 5 fields were used in 100% of the records (245,...
- Marc Records Under The Microscope
The University of North Texas (UNT)-Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK) announces a project investigating the coding of information in MARC records from the OCLC WorldCat database. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent Federal...
- Marc
LJ has the article MARC Must Die by Roy Tennant. He says that the numbered tags are a problem. I like to think of them as language independent. He suggests that XML may be a replacement. However, XML records are very much larger and XML only specifies...
Library Cataloging
MARC Content Designation Utilization
Seymour Lubetzky asked "Is This Rule Necessary?". Now a study is being done asking "Is this field necessary?" The MARC Content Designation Utilization study is examing just what fields are being used. This could inform decisions on what fields to include in a Core Record, what fields to include in MODS. When we went from cards to computers we carried over the card into a new format. Now as we are moving from MARC to FRBR and MARCXML we should not continue to carry over unnecessary fields and practices. This study will provide an empirical basis for those and many other decisions.
The results from a recent analysis of 400,000 MARC records conducted as part of an IMLS National Leadership Grant to establish a Z39.50 interoperability testbed indicated less than 50% of nearly 2,000 MARC 21 fields/subfields occurred even once in the records, and that only 36 of the fields/subfields accounted for approximately 80% of all use. These preliminary results have sparked interest by catalogers, managers of cataloging operations, standards developers, people involved in machine generation of metadata, and others. We are proposing a research project that builds upon the initial analysis to carry out a systematic analysis of MARC content designation use in large random samples of format-specific MARC 21 bibliographic records.MARC
- Marc @ Ala
Announcement for a presentation at ALA that sounds very interesting.Did you know that catalogers use only 10-20% of available MARC fields/subfields? Given evolving search behaviors and the amazoogle effects do our bibliographic records provide information...
- Marc Content Designation Utilization Project
The MARC Content Designation Utilization (MCDU) Project is now making available the first set of results from analyses of the MCDU dataset of more than 56 million MARC bibliographic records from OCLC's WorldCat database. Separate data reports containing...
- Marc Field Usage
A few days ago I mentioned the UNT MARC study of field usage in MARC records. It seems a similar study was done in 1997 in Germany. They found 33 elements that appeared in more than 1% of the records. Only 5 fields were used in 100% of the records (245,...
- Marc Records Under The Microscope
The University of North Texas (UNT)-Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK) announces a project investigating the coding of information in MARC records from the OCLC WorldCat database. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent Federal...
- Marc
LJ has the article MARC Must Die by Roy Tennant. He says that the numbered tags are a problem. I like to think of them as language independent. He suggests that XML may be a replacement. However, XML records are very much larger and XML only specifies...