1. A Metadata “Connexion” from SharePoint to WorldCat
Felicia Piscitelli
Texas A & M University
Music OCLC Users Group
January 31, 2018
Portland, Oregon

2. “Discovering a New World: Cataloging Old and Rare Imprints from Colonial and Early Independent Mexico”
Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) “Cataloging Hidden Collections” grant-funded project,
Principal investigators: three librarians from Texas A & M University and two librarians from Mexico (Hermeroteca National, and Universidad Iberoamericana)
13 students, all native or near-native Spanish speakers, participated

3. CLIR Grant Project
Experiment to see if students, with only basic training, could input bibliographic metadata into two prepared templates (books and single sheet documents)
Sharepoint used as platform for templates and databases OpenWMS, Greenstone, Google Doc also considered
Project conducted in stages of increasing difficulty: description, keywords, headings from controlled lists

4. OUR INITIAL PLAN
Export metadata from Sharepoint into Excel spreadsheets
Convert spreadsheet into MARC records via MARCEdit
Our original plan was to load MARC records into our Voyager catalog, edit them in Voyager, then batch export to OCLC

5. Overview of the Colonial Mexican Collection
Juan Pablos begins printing in Mexico City
Collection spans 1490s – 1870s
Subject Coverage
History, Anthropology, Linguistics, Government, Philosophy, Military Science, Civil and Canon Law, Religion (almost half the collection)
Geographic coverage
Mexico, Spain, Guatemala, Peru, Philippines, Low Countries, Italy, Germany
Languages
Spanish, Latin, Aztec, Mistec, Zapotec, Huastec, Otomí, Tarascan, French, Italian

6. Initial Success A total of 2,256 records entered
1644 books and pamphlets
612 single-sheet items (government and ecclesiastical documents, passports, proclamations, laws & regulations, etc.

7. Vexed by hex(adecimal)“ghost” characters
These appear as extraneous characters, extra spaces before or after punctuation marks
Some are invisible
They cause your cursor to “bump” or skip when scrolling
Occur especially before or after delimiter signs, diareses, ends of lines
Using wrong diacritics, cutting & pasting possible causes
Voyager could not compile MARC records from .mrc file, even after much cleanup
EXAMPLES/EJEMPLOS:
Reales…`
New Spain.?$b Viceroy? (this is not a question)
Alcabalas..." "??" Mexico (where there should be blanks)

8. Cleanup Find and replace Excel, OpenRefine, etc. Hexadecimal tools:
MARCEdit: MarcEdit Working with Clean Smart Characters Function
UE Studio (works with text files, including .mrk)

9. The Connexion
After cleanup, I was able to load the single-sheet file into a local Connexion save file (reverse from our original plan).
Connexion lets you check character validation before updating
So far, over 150 completed records from project are now in WorldCat, many more to come.

10. Aids in avoiding & fixing these guys
Avoid cutting and pasting; this sometimes introduces html code
Use ALA character set for diacritics
Export file as UTF-8

11. ¡Gracias. Thanks. A paper based on our CLIR project: https://www. clir
Felicia Piscitelli, M.M., M.L.S. Associate Professor Rare Book and Special Collections Cataloger and Italian Resources Librarian Cushing Memorial Library & Archives Texas A&M University 5000 TAMU | College Station, TX Tel |Fax