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The king of desks : Wooton’s patent secretary / by Betty Lawson Walters. (OCLC #49110)

MARC field 019 is used in OCLC for OCLC Control Number Cross-Reference; that is, when two (or more) OCLC records are merged, one OCLC accession number is kept for the record, and the others are put into 019, each into its own ǂa like:

019 __ ǂa 253458412

Records can be merged when a duplicate is accidentally created, such as when a master record is not found for some reason, or when the cataloger did not realize that the differences between descriptions are not sufficient to justify a new record. They can also be merged when cataloging rules change; for example, many older ebook records have 019 fields from when the title was cataloged on multiple records (each specific to one vendor/aggregator), and have since been combined into one provider-neutral record.

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Green woodwork : working with wood the natural way / Mike Abbott ; with a foreword by Richard La Trobe Bateman. (OCLC #27431448)

This volume is a 1991 reprint of a title originally published in 1989. Had I been doing original cataloging for this piece, I would have recorded only the 1989 publication date (like in this record) as printing date does not justify a new record in OCLC. There is a more popular (DLC) record for the reprint itself, indicating a publication with these fields:

DtSt: r      Dates 1991, 1989
260 __ ǂa Lewes, East Sussex : ǂb Guild of Master Craftsman
    Publications ; ǂa New York, N.Y. : ǂb Distributed by
    Sterling Pub., ǂc 1991.
500 __ ǂa Reprint. Originally published: 1989.

The Date: search box only searches the Date1 index (yr:) but not the Date2 index (yy:), so restricting the search to 1989 did not find the DLC record. When I’m not sure how a title has been cataloged but still wish to restrict by date, I use a range:

Date: 1989-1991
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Το ξύλο βγήκε απ’ τον παραδεισο (OCLC #810112973)

In the copy I found for this DVD, the title was represented in these linked fields in OCLC:

245 03 ǂa Το ξύλο [beta][gamma]ήκε [alpha][pi]' τον
[pi][alpha]ρ[alpha]́δεισο ǂh [videorecording]. 245 03 ǂa To xylo vgēke ap'ton paradeiso ǂh [videorecording]

In the actual MARC, the latter field would be the “regular” 245 linked using a ǂ6 to the vernacular form of the field in an 880. This appears to be an odd mix of following the LC-PCC PS for RDA 1.4 (Language and Script, section Greek and Other Non-Latin Script Letters, Ideographs, Etc.) and its exception that if a Greek or non-Latin letter appears separately, its name in the primary language should be given in brackets in the primary field, like:

245 10 ǂ6 880-01 ǂa [Alpha]-, [beta]-, and [gamma]-spectroscopy
880 10 ǂ6 245-01/(S ǂa α-, β-, and γ-spectroscopy

(There is a similar instruction in AACR2.)

Given that only a few of the letters were converted, and the change was made in the wrong version of the field (and how many similar results are retrieved by the search “ti: gamma and la: gre”), it looks like somebody’s clean-up script has gone wild.

Be aware of such weirdness when searching for Greek!

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Treasures for the table : an exhibition of contemporary table settings, Majolica from Faenza = Tesori per la tavola : una mostra di servizi da tavola contemporanei in Maiolica di Faenza / organized by the Comune di Faenza and Istituto Italiano di Cultura of New York. (OCLC #12786063)

MARC field 041 is language code, which can include information about translation, or languages used for various parts of the resource (table of contents, abstracts, etc.) This piece has the field:

041 0_ ǂa itaeng

summarizing the language information found in this note:

546 __ ǂa Texts in Italian and English.

Including both codes “ita” and “eng” in one subfield is an older convention (made obsolete in 2001), and these days would be coded with repeated subfield a:

041 0_ ǂa ita ǂa eng

The most recent OCLC tech bulletin (264) says that, in their database, all 041 subfields that contain multiple MARC 21 language codes will be converted into separate subfields for each language code.

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Cults of America / by Maurice Beam. (OCLC #5796766)

Vinabind is a binding process where the paperback cover (and any stickers or labels on it) is laminated and then the book is re-bound with that cover. RDA 3.22.1.3 on Making Notes on Item-Specific Carrier Characteristics says to “make a note about carrier characteristics of the specific item being described if considered important for identification or selection.”

This volume is not an early printed resource (which have different rules in RDA) and this did not seem like an important enough feature to record, so I did not mention it even in our local copy. In OCLC, local binding does not generally justify a new record, though one record (and only one that I can find!) does mention it.

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The public papers of governor Martha Layne Collins, 1983-1987 / Elizabeth Duffy Fraas, editor. (OCLC #884916739)

If you are cataloging a digitized copy of a print book, you can use the OCLC macro OCLC!GenerateERecord while viewing a print record to create a workform with the same information, edited somewhat to indicate that it is an ebook. You’ll still have to do some editing, but it is a good start!

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From Aristotle to Schrödinger : the curiosity of physics / Antonis Modinos. (OCLC #867822764)

I didn’t spot the popular copy for this book on my first search because I did a personal name search for the author’s first and last name:

    pn: antonis and pn: modinos

Unfortunately, pn: indexes relatively few fields, all for access points:

    100/a,b,c,d,j,q,u
    700/a,b,c,d,j,q,u

I didn’t find the record, because the author’s name authority has been established only with his first initial:

    Modinos, A., ǂd 1938-

(details confirmed on distributor web sites).

A broader index for author names is au: which indexes the same fields as above, but many more as well, including 245ǂc (which would include the full form as transcribed in the statement of responsibility) but more unusual ones too, including:

  • 505ǂr – Statement of responsibility in a formatted contents note
  • 508ǂa – Creation/production credits note
  • 511ǂa – Participant or performer note
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Zooming in : the cosmos at high resolution / edited by Regina von Berlepsch. (OCLC #868967245)

My library has no other volumes of this serial, so I chose to catalog this one as a monograph, classified separately, with the series traced. I found two monograph records for this particular volume in OCLC, and the more popular one recorded the title as:

    245 00 ǂa Reviews in modern astronomy. ǂn 23, ǂp Zooming in:
      the cosmos at high resolution / ǂc edited by Regina von
      Berlepsch.

This is a reasonable approach, as the series title is more prominent than the volume title, even on the title page, but I prefer to use the volume title as the title proper, with the series in a series statement / added entry:

    490 1_ ǂa Reviews in modern astronomy ; ‡v 23
    830 _0 ǂa Reviews in modern astronomy ; ‡v 23.

Our analyzing, tracing and classifying decisions for this series differ from LC practice, so I edited our local series authority to reflect this.

I expect these two records will eventually be merged, as differing selection of title proper does not justify a new record.

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Si nous vivions en 1913 / Antoine Prost. (OCLC #878360972)

Did you know that if you update an existing OCLC record by putting a new call number in an 090, that call number won’t be saved in the master record? They do get saved in new records (maybe in records with no other call number?), so I’d been assuming they’d save. For the existing record for this title, I added a complete call number in an 050.

Before I assign a new call number, I always peek into nearby OPACs using OCLC’s “Find in a Library” service; sometimes I find a good call number that may have unintentionally not been shared.

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La Grande Guerre expliquée en images / Antoine Prost. (OCLC #868020225)

When you specify the number of non-filing characters for a title, you are not just saying how a title should be sorted, but also how it should be indexed. Specifically, any characters you skip will not be considered part of the title, or even the record.

For example, if you do a title search in OCLC for:

la grande guerre expliquee en images

it will return no results, because the title field’s second indicator says to skip the first three characters:

245 13 La Grande Guerre expliquée en images / ǂc Antoine Prost.

For more on what not to search for, check out my longer blog post.