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Salvete!<br>
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>BTW, has anybody written a script that would work through a list of <br>
>ISBNs and download the MARC records for them? <br>
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The degreed librarians among us, myself included, have often been critical of this behaviour. I'm afraid that *why* we don't do that sort of thing has not been clarified to the extent that we ought to.<br>
You really, really should go record by record through your collection and actually evaluate each MARC record. MARC records can be extremely detailed - and in most cases should be extremely detailed.<br>
First, there ought to be notes with a good record. CDs come to mind. A bad CD record will not have a note referring to the tracks on a given musical CD. A good record will have each track title. This is useful for patrons - highly so. Suppose I am looking for the song Magic Stick by the rapper 50 cent. If I typed in Magic Stick to my catalogue, and the MARC record I had for 'Get Rich or Die Tryin' had the notes, that record would appear in the search listings. <br>
Further, a good MARC record for that would have an alternate author or performer listing for Fifty Cent and perhaps even Fifty Cents for patrons who try different spellings of the artist's name. It might even carry Snoop Dog and L'il Kim. <br>
Numerical differences happen quite often in cataloguing. Janet Evanovich's series come to mind. If a patron types in "10 Big Ones", you want that entry in the alternate title field so that they pull it up. <br>
All of these points fall under the law "Save the time of the reader." Sometimes that means taking more time on our end. I have seen some terrible records in my short tenure - those that are missing a Title or Author field where there ought to be. Were you to simply retrieve those records automatically, you'd be stuck with those in your catalogue, and have no means of knowing that they are there. <br>
So, I individually cull Fiction and Non Fiction adult records from the Library of Congress (which is free) because those records tend to be good. <br>
I individually cull Children's records from Access Pennsylvania or perhaps Maine InfoNet.<br>
I individually cull CDs and DVDs from Access Pennsylvania and Maine InfoNet. I used to use Kansas City's catalogue, but alas, they no longer allow MARC downloads for records.<br>
Which brings me to this point - I would love for Koha to have an obvious means of download of MARC records. Perhaps I like one of Stephen's records. It would be great to be able to download that, like I can with Library of Congress. If it does, I've obviously missed something, and I apologise.<br>
To sum up again, Z39.50 is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.<br>
<br>
Brooke @ Hinsdale
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