Metadata and cataloging

Today I met with Mark for a bit and we talked through a few more metadata issues, as I'm trying to get as much info to Andrew and Cassandra as I can to help with the transfer from MARCXML to BibClass. There are still a lot of unanswered questions. I think we may just need to try a few and see what happens! Mark made some very good points today as I was asking questions that were geared mainly to the records I'm dealing with... Yes, there's only so much I can do in my time frame but if this is going to serve as a guide for Gaylord in the future, with different parts of the collection, there are issues that may or may not be dealt with in the same way. Call numbers, for example - the part of the collection I'm working with doesn't have them, but other parts do (bound volumes, for example). The rights question is tricky - we do have a statement geared toward print Special Collections materials that we could link to, but it doesn't make any mention of digital manifestations at all. I'll need to talk with Brad more about that. It's kind of a tricky subject. He reminded me that the actual date of digitization could prove to be useful to someone at some point in the future, and even if we can't get it in there easily for this part of the collection, it would be good to know how to do it. Since DLXS will need to pull the pdfs themselves from the server, and those files contain the date information, there must be a way to automatically pull out that date and add it somehow. I really have no idea, but it sounds like there must be a way!

Without knowing how the [whatever it is that's going to transform the MARCXML stuff to BibClass] is going to treat indicators and subfields, it's a little hard to know how specific I need to be in my mappings. I guess I'll get as reasonably specific I can get, and let them know what I "hope" it can do, and then see what happens. I may be sorely disappointed and end up needing to do a lot of manual tweaking, but oh well!

I also did some cataloging today - these last pieces seem to be a bit more straightforward which is a nice change. I should have no problem finishing them this week or next. I hope that Mark will look at them and let me know if anything looks amiss. I came across an interesting problem today - turns out there was already a record in the suppl catalog for one I cataloged, but it wasn't immediately obvious. The copy already cataloged was missing the t.p. so some of the information was different. I looked at it, though, and realized it was, indeed, the same piece, just without the t.p.! I'm not sure how to handle it (I guess they both need to belong to the same record, which will be awkward since there's more info for one than for the other) - I'll have to ask Mark.

Hours today: 3.5
Hours this week: 6.5
Total hours completed: 101