[Koha] Dealing with bad MARC records

[BWS Johnson]

Salvete!

> Using MS Word 
>however, I could ask it to find the weird non-numeric field designator
and change it to something 
>distinctively numeric.
>

Hmmm. Word adds a whole bunch of junk when it does anything whatsoever.
It's part of its proprietary doesn't play well with others routine. May
I suggest a slightly more deprecated approach through Notepad?


>The trouble with any manual process like that is that our librarians 
>will skip it. I'm already struggling to get them to follow the minimal 
>workflow I introduced, they have a tendency to take short cuts that end
>up with bad or incomplete records in our catalogue. It's difficult to 
>persuade them that it's not quantity but quality of records that's 
>important.
>
>In this case, when my program didn't work, they decided to just import 
>the records straight into Koha (without asking me). Koha couldn't read 
>the records, so they decided to enter them manually but couldn't be 
>bothered typing anything more than a few words from the title, 
>misspelled and with incorrect capitalisation.
>

Ah! I see the problem. >;) You need the angry mob argument. As in, when
you don't catalogue these properly, and thus can't find a darn thing
later (or worse, frustrate one of your Patrons) they will come hunting
for you. Indeed, the coworkers will start the slaughter if they can't
issue something when the need arises. It would be very easily
demonstrated if you pulled a very prolific author and showed them what
happens. For instance, I pull

Martin, Ann M. 

since I'm a public with one heck of a chunk of the Baby - Sitter's Club.
They'll see that

Matin, Ann
Martin, Anne
Martin, Ann M

all are not acceptable since they produce different (wrong!) results.
Basically, they have to realise that it's a larger pain in the rear
later if they're lazy now, which can of course be a hard argument with
folks that live in the moment.

If they still don't get it, then you needs snitch on them to a higher
authority with firing power. 

Out of morbid curiousity, do these bad fields originate from a certain
catalogue? Perhaps its feasible to avoid the problem entirely by
locating a catalogue to query that doesn't have crummy fields in the
first place.

Cheers,
Brooke @ Hinsdale MA 
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