As part of moving special collections stock we needed to identify item records containing a non-public note (MARC field 852 $x or MARC field 952 $x in Koha). Historically, this free text field has been used to input details about the precise location of each item, such as section, folder, etc. The initial report drawn up by the systems librarian, however, showed only a fraction of the items housed in the special collection location. Read more

Inconsistent or wrong punctuation is an eyesore for caloguers. Originally designed to fascilitate metadata display in card catalogues, it is currently used in parallel to MARC subfield coding to designate different parts of the bibliographic description. The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is widely used amond cataloguing agencies and libraries as it provides rules for punctuation between and within the individual fields of the MARC record. ISBD compliance is arguably time-consuming and redundant. Read more