Tag: oclc

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Basic data on depressive symptomatology, United States, 1974-75 / [Rona Beth Sayetta and David P. Johnson]. (OCLC #5833792)

To search for a Sudoc number in OCLC (like “HE 20.6209:11/216”), use the gn: index, and remove all punctuation and spacing from the number:

gn: HE20620911216

This search does return the title we’re looking for:

Vital and health statistics. Series 11, no. 216
HE 20.6209:11/216

but also this one, whose Sudoc number compresses to the same string:

NCHS CD-ROM. Series 21, no. 6.
HE 20.6209/11:21/6

This is still a useful search, to quickly get you to government document records (if they exist), but since that compression to the search string is lossy, you must confirm that any record you find this way is the correct one.

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Lincoln on Lincoln / selected and edited by Paul M. Zall. (OCLC #606468200)

A title search in OCLC for the quoted phrase “lincoln on lincoln” retrieves not only the book with that title, but also a book called Lincoln before Lincoln.

Since “on” is a stop word, the search done is:

    Lincoln w1 Lincoln

That is, two copies of the word “Lincoln” with at most one other word (any word) between them.

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BIM – Building Information Modeling / Management : Methoden und Strategien für den Planungsprozess Beispiele aus der Praxis / herausgeber: Tim Westphal, Eva Maria Hermann. (OCLC #950982462)

I was confused by the title of this book, and not just because it’s half-English/half-German, but because that “I” between “Modeling” and “Management” didn’t make any sense, in English or German, as a regular word or a Roman numeral.

I googled around and all online shops I found this title in had it as a capital I. The version on the spine of the book (inset on the image) suggested that it was not a capital I, but more like a pipe or vertical bar (“|”) which made a lot more sense. That character is not in the ALA character set, so I could not actually use it in the OCLC record (now I know how to make that block ∎), so I went with a forward slash:

    245 00 ǂa BIM - Building Information Modeling / Management : 
        ǂb Methoden und Strategien für den Planungsprozess Beispiele
        aus der Praxis / ǂc herausgeber: Tim Westphal, Eva Maria 
        Hermann.

As folks seem likely to think it’s a capital I and search that way, I included a title added entry: 

    246 3_ ǂa BIM - Building Information Modeling I Management
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Nizhegorodskie dokumenty XVI [i.e. shestnadt︠s︡atogo] veka : (1588-1600 gg.) / G.N. Anpilogov. (OCLC #3459594)

If you’re unfamiliar with the words in a language, it may also be difficult to recognize punctuation and word boundaries. This title’s first two lines form a single word:

Нижегородские

separated on the page with a fancy hyphen. The word is not typically hyphenated (so is not transcribed that way into the record) so for copy cataloging you must search for the full form “nizhegorodskie” rather than a separated version like “nizhegorod skie” or even “nizhegorod-skie”.

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Reason and religion : philosophy and religion in a scientific age. (OCLC #59630)

Be careful when typing a general-sounding series title into an 830 and controlling it in OCLC; if it’s in a 430 for a more specific series, it may do something you don’t expect!

This resource appears to have a series title “general studies”, a phrase which appears in a 430 for the heading:

Cass library of African studies. General studies

so an 830 controls to that heading.

That’s not the desired link; the book in hand is not from the right publisher, nor is it about African studies, so I ended up just including it untraced:

490 0_ ǂa General studies

(I once saw this in a medical book record, where “case files” was controlled as “Scooby-Doo! case files”!)

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Alfred : the first Continental flagship, 1775-1778 / John J. McCusker. (OCLC #446066)

The Name/Title derived search in OCLC can be done in the command line search by entering the first four letters of the author’s name and the first four letters of the title, separated by a comma. This is sometimes called a 4,4 search, and can be explicitly used using the nd: index.

There’s a surprising detail about this index (and other derived indexes involving names) which is that if the name starts with Mc or Mac followed by a capital letter (like McCusker), that Mc or Mac is only represented as “m” in the search. So the name/title derived search that would retrieve the above title is:

mcus,alfr
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It’s amazing the things you find when people retire and mail you the problem piles that result from cleaning their offices. Why did these things stay in processing limbo instead of moving out into the collection? It’s a mystery, but one that often doesn’t matter – the real question is, where should they go now?

This printout stuck in a nearly-cataloged book is from around 2003, so is probably from OCLC Passport? The call number label is no longer sticky, which is fine, because it is not the one we’d choose for this volume. Maybe that was the problem.

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Die Ausgewanderten : vier lange Erzählungen / W.G. Sebald. (OCLC #899212280)

First original cataloging of the new year – fortunately, it was an easy one, as there was good copy from a previous edition to derive from, though there were differences (publisher, publication year) that justified a new record in OCLC.

Happy New Year!

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Aliens in the United States (number of aliens in the United States, by States, counties, and nationalities, who reported under the Immigration and nationality act during January 1965) Prepared for the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate. (OCLC #184920)

I know now that the monthly catalog record for this title says “Aliens in United States” (missing a word), which is why my full title searches were not finding it. I continued my search using the SuDoc number instead.

I initially misread the second cutter in the SuDoc, first looking too quickly and seeing only an “A” with a flourish, and then recognizing it as “Ae”. That also turned out to be incorrect.

I had found the OCLC record already (no SuDoc number), so used the Find in a Library feature to check what other people had as its SuDoc number in their government document collections. I found a library with a slight different SuDoc number (another variant!):

Y4.J89/2:A14/5

before finally finding the correct one:

Y 4.J 89/2:AL 4/5

and spotting that those letters must start the cutter for ALiens.

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Cinémas d’Afrique francophone et du Maghreb / Denise Brahimi. (OCLC #37413829)

While you can search titles for words using diacritics in Connexion client (there is a button to Enter Diacritics), you will find them just as easily typing them without, like for “cinémas”, you can search:

cinemas

Similarly, some punctuation between letters does not separate them into multiple words in the index, so you can search for “d’Afrique” as:

dafrique

Words with apostrophes index with a space as well, so you could also find this record with the search:

"d afrique"

but this would not retrieve records where a right single quote (’) is used, like in this record, so I am usually happiest using no space.

Other punctuation marks have different behavior. For example, periods, commas or hyphens between words are equivalent to space, so this title is also retrieved by the search:

francophone-et,du.maghreb