Case study : creating a usable MARC file from a spreadsheet Thomas Meehan Head of Current Cataloguing UCL Library Services CILIP CIG Metadata Tools Workshop Birmingham 20 November 2015

Problem We have access to a package of 246 ebooks but We needed records quickly There were no easily available records Cataloguing each ebook individually would be too time consuming However, we have an Excel file…

Excel file

Sketchy, but has: Title Editor information (but in the same field as the Title) Edition (but in the same field as the Title) URL Using the Delimited Text Translator in Marcedit, we can convert these to MARC records.

Conversion In Marcedit: Click on Delimited Text Translator Input File is the Excel file Output File in the.mrk file you want to create, westlaw.mrk Excel Sheet Name is the name of the specific worksheet, in this case Westlaw ebooks Delimiter is whatever separates the columns, in this case Tab is fine Click on Next

Assign MARC Fields For each column (if wanted), assign a MARC field: Select a column, e.g. Field 2 for the Title (etc). This needs to be highlighted. Map To a MARC field, including a subfield code, e.g. 245$a Enter the Indicators, e.g. 00 to be on the safe side (can tidy up later) Click on Apply, and this field is added to a list. Repeat with any more fields. In this case we also want: Field 3 mapping to 856$u with indicators 40 Click on Finish

Check and Tidy Check the.mrk record! Some observations: 008 is basically blank. Edition and editors mixed in with titles. As these are updating “looseleafs” we wanted edition specific information removed. No 260/264 or 300 information. No RDA 33x fields. Needs local notes for access and tagging. No subjects (even 650 _0$aLaw$zGreat Britain would be better than nothing?). We can try to fix some of this with the following Task List…

Summary of Task List As this was only done once, a Task List was not necessary, but it meant it could be edited and re-run to check results (or used in future demonstrations…) The LDR position 18 changed to “i” for RDA 006 and 007 fields are added The 008 is changed to be generic but correct 040 field added Editors’ names extracted (using regular expression) from 245 and put into 500 fields Edition information removed from 245 (using regular expression) Generic 264 added RDA 33x fields added Local ebook furniture added Generic subject headings added

What Next? Convert the records to a raw MARC.mrc file: File>Compile File into MARC Import into Aleph Do local edits at leisure Remove a small number of duplicated records Add identifiers or ISBNs to allow linking to SFX. These can be exported back out of Marcedit using Tools>Export>Export Tab Delimited Records We have also used a variation on the above to add URLs to a file of ebook records that didn’t have any 856 fields. We converted an Excel file with ISBNs and URLs in it to MARC, which is then merged with the original file.

The Records Now in Our Discovery System primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/search.d o?fn=search&ct=search&initialSearch=true&mode=Basic&tab=local&in dx=1&dum=true&srt=rank&vid=UCL_VU1&frbg=&tb=t&vl%28freeText0 %29=uclebkwestlaw&scp.scps=scope%3A%28UCL_LMS_DS%29

Case study : creating a usable MARC file from a spreadsheet Thomas Meehan Head of Current Cataloguing UCL Library Services CILIP CIG Metadata Tools Workshop Birmingham 20 November 2015