Hello! I’m back with another edition of “Elliot writes out the process for how I did something, mostly for myself, but puts on the internet in case anyone else finds it useful.” This one started out as one thing (counting percentages of MARC records in a set that contain a given field) and morphed into […]
Searching for unique subject headings in DPLA
I’ve been thinking about subject headings a lot lately (as one does), and it inspired me to return to some work that I had started doing while I was at TDL, thinking about subject heading uniqueness in DPLA. One of the things that I’ve noticed in my own metadata work, and that was confirmed for […]
Batch download LCSH files
It’s been a minute since I wrote anything on this here blog, but I was working through a process today that I wanted to document and thought that other folks might be interested in. This week, a group of coworkers and I were discussing whether there is an LCSH for “Cuban diaspora” (there is not), […]
RDA and religion
I’ve been feeling curious about the number of rules in RDA that deal specifically and explicitly with religion. Because I’m generally interested in the development and history of cataloging standards, the number of religion-specific rules seems notable. Why is religion given so much attention, and are there historical reasons for that? I’m not trying to […]
I made a twitter bot!
‘People taking a gondola ride along the Coral Gables Waterway. Coral Gables, Florida’ “Recognizing the importance of having a luxury resort hotel in the city, George Merrick turned to John McEntee Bowman, President o…’https://t.co/27MqoSFJtU — SSDNbot☀🌴🐊 (@SSDNbot) June 16, 2018 I love twitter bots. There are some really cool ones doing interesting things with cultural […]
Export CONTENTdm Full Text field to .txt files
This week, we had a case at my library where we wanted to extract the full-text field for a few of our digital collections and save it as a separate text file for each image. Normally, we create text files for images by running OCR on them outside of CONTENTdm. But for a few collections, […]
#archivalfeelings: metadata, history, connection
Earlier this summer, I had an experience where a collection that I was creating metadata for had a really strong emotional impact on me. It felt really significant, and made me think about the ways that I relate to collections that I work with. I tweeted about the experience at the time, and I’ve collected […]
MARC history timeline
I’m working on a handful of projects about the history of MARC, and one of the things that would be really useful to me is a good, concise history of the family of MARC formats. I haven’t been able to find quite what I’m looking for, so I decided to make it! The timeline below […]
Controlling all the names with OpenRefine
I’m trying to get better at writing out the process for things that I do in my day-to-day metadata work. Mostly, I want to do this for my own personal use – to help me think through my processes more clearly, and to have something to refer back to the next time I want to […]
Exploring RDA with RIMMF
After reading about the Jane-athon that is happening at ALA Midwinter in a few months, I decided that I’d like to play around with RDA cataloging outside of the strictures of MARC. I had a quiet afternoon at my library a few weeks ago, so I figured it was a good time to download the […]