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Software Tools and Tips for Metadata Wranglers and Catalogers

Excel

Concatenate and Format (Custom Excel Function)
Concatenating when some cells are empty
Convert dates
Convert letters to numbers/numbers to letters
Remove leading or trailing characters
Splitting dates from Title column

MarcEdit

"Better, Not Perfect" Tasklist Examples

OCLC Connexion

Disclaimer: These macros are being made available under the following software license:

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019 UC San Diego Library

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Batch Control Report 1902 (shared for MOUG 2019, 2021)

MacroDescription: Macro will work through consecutively-numbered items in a save file and control all headings, and then check for 1XX, 6XX, 7XX and 8XX fields that are still not controlled and write the uncontrolled headings to desktop file, ControlledHeadingsReport.tsv, a tab-separated file that can be viewed as a text file or opened as a spreadsheet to view and manipulate the report. Multiple uncontrolled terms in a single record will report in a single tab-separated block, with the individual fields separated in the block by pipes ("|"). These can be used to further separate the cell in Excel if desired.

Übermacro Lite, Batch Version 1902

MacroDescription: This February 2019 version of the Music & Media Uber Macro is a simplified, batch-cataloging-dedicated version of more complex macros used in general cataloging by the Music & Media Metadata unit of the UC San Diego Metadata Services program. This macro will start at the beginning of a save file and perform the following operations on each record in the file:

  •  Apply the Control All macro command, to control all controllable headings in a record. As with manually applying this command, access points for persons that lack dates or qualifiers will not be controlled, nor will any headings for which there is not match in an authority file.
  •  Supply RDA relationship designator equivalents for 46 MARC relator codes. If there are multiple $4's the $e designators will be supplied in WEMI order and alphabetized. It may be necessary to do further work to supply more granular terms if the RDA term is not as specific as desired (e.g., "performer").
  •  Save the record and move on to the next record, until the end of file is reached.

Metadata Rescue (shared for MOUG 2021)

MacroDescription: This is a macro with a number of operations which was used restore some cataloging work done to records before they were machine merged into records with headings in their raw, uncontrolled state. It's extremely specific as to what it does and wouldn't be usable as-is, but is shared here in case the spare parts might be useful to assemble other macros that might use some of its features.

The macro takes authority-controlled 100 and 700 strings from the Millennium catalog, and also the 001 OCLC number to be used to re-inject the authority-controlled fields into the OCLC master records, and also uses the local catalog identifier to formulate a string to be used to re-overlay the Millennium record when complete. The source strings are output from Millennium with $0 identifiers which are converted into $1 RWO identifiers in an intermediate step before the data is fed to the macro; this was in part done as part of the PCC URIs in MARC Pilot project, so records bear 588s with a default project note.

The macro has routines which will additionally:

  • Remove 100 fields with "Anonymous" for contents, and adjust 245 indicator to be non-tracing
  • Check for the presence of "pn" in the 040 $e and delete 490s and 830s tied to this Alexander Street Press set, as well as delete certain proxy and institution-specific URLs in 856s.
  • Converts 773s with "Recent Researches in the ..." text into eye-readable notes. This was a characteristic specific to some of the records in this set
  • Replaces 336, 337, 338 and 344 fields with forms with full $2 information and $0 RDA Registry values
  • Creates a 949 field with the Millennium record number to use for overlaying the source bib record
  • Controls all the headings that can be controlled using the "Control Headings All" command
  • Saves the record in the local save file
  • Writes a brief report of what it did

The weak link in the macro is dealing with character encoding using the Connexion macro language, and the macro uses a workaround which combines characters with five diacritical marks. The output is fairly reliable but fails occasionally. Also diacritics other than these core five require manual hand-work. Feedback would be appreciated on improving this process!