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 […]
Category: Cataloging
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Reclassifying DVDs, Part 2: Wrestling with Genres
Over the past few months, I have been reclassifying the “Popular Movie Collection” at the small academic library where I work. This is the second of two blog posts about the project. In the first entry, I wrote about finding a way to fit movies into the Library of Congress classification system. In this post, […]
Reclassifying DVDs, Part 1: Creating a System
Over the last few months, I have been working on reclassifying the “Popular Movie Collection” at the small academic library where I work. This is the first of two blog posts I am planning about the project, describing the process of deciding how to classify the movies. [Update: Part 2 can be found here.] The […]