Month: December 2014

Categories
Uncategorized

Conoco’s tar sands development in South Texas / Michael W. Britton. (OCLC #898578225)

This title is about tar sands in South Texas. The authorized heading Oil sands can be subdivided geographically, and a geographic term is available for South Texas (South Texas), so we can assign the heading.

650 _0 ǂa Oil sands ǂz Texas, South.

I was surprised that OCLC’s Generate043 macro did not trigger based on this heading, so added the 043 for Texas by hand:

043 __ ǂa n-us-tx

I wonder which other headings are not being detected? Code for the macro is available from Connexion’s Tools -> Macros, and though it is over 2000 lines long, much of it is data, so it seems reasonable to read – maybe I’ll bring this one next time it’s my turn to host Code Club.

Categories
Uncategorized

Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law : Boston College, 12-16 August 1963 / edited by Stephan Kuttner and J. Joseph Ryan. (OCLC #4289022)

This volume has text in multiple languages:

546 __ ǂa Text in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

which is also encoded in the 041 as:

041 0_ ǂa engfregeritaspa

This is hard to read and error-prone, as shown in a similar volume which had this encoded as

041 0_ engfregerha

There is no MARC language code “ha”; they are all three letters long. I have now corrected this record, and encoded in the current standard:

041 0_ ǂa eng ǂa fre ǂa ger ǂa ita
Categories
Uncategorized

Practical applications of agricultural system models to optimize the use of limited water / Lajpat R. Ahuja, Liwang Ma, and Robert J. Lascano, editors. (OCLC #898368212)

RDA 2.8.4.5 on resources having more than one publisher says to record the publishers’ names in the order indicated by the sequence, layout, or typography of the names on the source of information, though the main rule indicates that in that case, only the first publisher is core.

For this resource, I decided to record all three :

264 _1 ǂa Madison, WI : ǂb American Society of Agronomy :
    ǂb Crop Science Society of America :
    ǂb Soil Science Society of America, ǂc [2014]
Categories
Uncategorized

The half-blood : a cultural symbol in 19th century American fiction / William J. Scheick. (OCLC #897378817)

The LCSH subject heading for Native Americans in the United States is “Indians of North America”, so this title has the heading:

650 _0 ǂa Indians of North America ǂx Mixed descent.

The subject heading “Indians” has the scope note:

Here are entered works on the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, including Eskimos. Works on the inhabitants of India in general are entered under East Indians.

My colleague Karen Nuckolls is publishing an update to her 1994 article “The Library of Congress Subject Heading Shortfall” which mentions this as an example of a term which needed (and apparently still needs) to be updated.

Categories
Uncategorized

From slavery to the cooperative commonwealth : labor and republican liberty in the nineteenth century / Alex Gourevitch, Brown University. (OCLC #885983229)

The CIP record for this title included the following:

245 10 Labor republicanism and the cooperative commonwealth : ǂb
    something of slavery still remains / ǂc Alex Gourevitch,
    Brown University.

which is very different from the title that appears on the piece as published; I only found it by searching for the LCCN. (The original title is still in LC’s catalog). The list of chapters in the contents note was identical, which helped convince me that this was the same book.

I updated the CIP record in OCLC to reflect the information on the item as published, as instructed in OCLC’s guidelines. As described in OCLC’s Quality Assurance document, I was not able to change the ELvl, so left this as 8, and also left 263 in the record.

Categories
Uncategorized

Observations on the influence of religion upon the health and physical welfare of mankind. (OCLC #632285)

This piece is a 1973 reprint of an 1835 title. Difference in printing date is not usually sufficient to input a new record (so we might have used copy for the original) but this piece includes both the original title page and a new title page indicating the new publisher and the new series information, and we found popular copy that reflected that:

260 __ ǂa New York, ǂb Arno Press, ǂc 1973 [©1835]
490 1_ ǂa Mental illness and social policy: the American experience
500 __ ǂa Reprint of the ed. published by Marsh, Capen & Lyon, Boston.
830 _0 ǂa Mental illness and social policy: the American experience.
Categories
Uncategorized

Supernatural. The complete first season [videorecording] / Warner Bros. Entertainment ; created by Eric Kripke. (OCLC #178961060)

We got this (used) DVD set as a gift to the library from a professor using it for his class. Though the packaging says “quality guaranteed”, I confirmed that we had all the correct discs and that each one would play. Though I probably could have quickly done the copy cataloging based on the container and assumed everything was fine, I’d prefer not to leave any problems for the professor to discover in class while he still has time to return the item to the seller.

The same professor gave us two seasons of The Rockford Files as well; should be a fun class!

Categories
Uncategorized

The longest shot : Lil E. Tee and the Kentucky Derby / John Eisenberg. (OCLC #897135902)

The subject heading for the racehorse Lil E. Tee (winner of the 1992 Kentucky Derby) was established as a (topical) subject heading:

    150  Lil E. Tee (Race horse)

which is odd. The section of the Subject Heading Manual on “Establishing Certain Entities in the Name or Subject Authority File” says that Named Animals should be established as a name authority, specifically in a 100. The record was entered in 1995, around the time that these distinctions were in flux.

A search in the name authority file for “race horse” only produced about 13 headings of that form (like Man o’ War (Race horse), 1917-1947), but the search for that phrase in topical headings produced close to a hundred headings (including Barbaro (Race horse), born 2003), so there is still inconsistency in how these are being established.

Categories
Uncategorized

Русские сказания / Ю. П. Миролюбов (OCLC #889865076)

Even when I am familiar with an alphabet, a fancy font can throw me off, as it did for the series statement on this piece. On the title page, the title and statement of responsibility were in a more standard font, but the series statement looked much like it did in the sun on the upper right.

Though I would never use CIP data (the description on the title page verso) as a source of information to put in the record, it did provide a handy transcription of the series statement in a standard font, which I could then confirm, and add to the record as linked fields:

    490 _1 Неведомая Русь
    490 _1 Nevedomai︠a︡ Rusʹ
    830 _0 Неведомая Русь.
    830 _0 Nevedomai︠a︡ Rusʹ.

I’m not sure why I add the vernacular version to access points, but I think it looks nice.

Categories
Uncategorized

Surrender or starve : travels in Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia / Robert D. Kaplan. (OCLC #52381251)

Though this title is about four different countries, there are more than three of them, so by the rule of three, we include only their broader geographic subject heading:

651 _0 ǂa Africa, Northeast ǂx Description and travel.

The names of the countries are in the title; as they are available from a keyword search, not much subject access is lost by not also including them as subjects.