In this Twitter thread, Kristina Spurgin describes a pattern of errors in MARC records that I’ve been running into lately as well: a lowercase L in place of a one in dates, like “l905”. I’d also been assuming it was an artifact of OCR.
Her coworker explained that typewriters used to not have a one digit, and even after they did, people had strong muscle memory to type l (ell) instead of 1.
Now, if I can only figure out why this title started with “0il”…