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August 2011

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Subject:
From:
Evan Lurie <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
MarcEdit support in technical and instructional matters <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:36:02 -0400
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text/plain
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Terry--

I greatly appreciate your tracking down the proper file format.  I'm running 
into other problems as I head down this route.

There are two challenges (at least in my mind) in working with my current 
dataset.  

1)  Many records do not have any 020 at all.  When I use the merge records 
utility and use the LoC records as the merge file and join by 020, those 
records without any 020 in the original dataset are overridden with one record 
from the LoC record.  For example, if I have a bibliographic entry with no 020, 
the 100, 245 and other fields representing that entry are overriden with values 
from a different book even though there is no match.  In relational db speak, it 
seems the merge records utility is not handling the outer join properly.  To get 
around this, I am using the LoC records as the source and the original dataset 
as the merge file.  This leads me to the problem below.

2)  Some records in the current data set have multiple entries for the same 
field (for example, 650 or 852).  This might represent multiple copies of the 
same book (in the case of multiple 852 entries) or simply more than one 
subject heading (in the case of multiple 650 entries).  I know this is legitimate 
MARC syntax, however, it seems that the merge records utility only grabs the 
values in the first field and writes them to the new file for as many times as 
they appear in the merge file.  In the alternative, if I ask the merge utility to 
record all unique values, I will end up with multiple entries for the 100, 245, 
250,260,300 etc., one pair based on LoC entries and another based on the 
current dataset.

I think I've come up with a solution, but it feels cludgy and it does not solve 
my initial problem of updating records that do not match via 020.  However, I 
believe that if I purge the 650 and the 852 from my newly created file 
containing both untouched and updated records, and then merge with the old 
dataset on the control number instead of the 020, I can bring in each unique 
650 and 852.  This still doesn't feel very elegant, but it works.

QUESTION:  How does the MARC21 merge records function operate?  When I 
try to merge the records based on MARC21 with all the specific fields 
selected, essentially nothing matches.  However, this doesn't stop the utility 
from simply grabbing the first 090 and 650 records encountered in the merge 
file and slamming them into the first record in the source file.  This continues 
record by record.  I would hope if there is no match, then nothing is updated.

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