Library Technician

I ordered an article from the British Library today. I haven't done that for years and the system was so different back then. I remember the requests had to be formatted exactly and could only be so many characters wide. That was a long time ago. This time I used Articles Direct and a department credit card. I really liked it this way, the prices are good enough and the options are good. One point - I wouldn't recommend ordering from the catalogue record itself even though the records have a link to request - there are fields that don't have explanation, but if you use the web order form from the Articles Direct information page you can find out what those fields mean. Also on the form attached to the catalogue record they need a 5 digit expiry date! I didn't work that one out at all.

All in all a good service especially seeing as it was from a different country. I did manage to work it all out by myself which is a sign to me that even though their system isn't perfect it's not bad.

I decided to give myself a time filling job. Actually I've been doing it for some time. I've been working on cleaning up the authority files. Sometimes just quick jobs such as looking for capitals in the wrong MARC format and getting rid of duplicate headings. Yesterday I decided to do our own dept. We publish a lot and since the mid 1800's we've had 4 different names. Luckily I didn't have to investigate all of the names and when they changed because that's already been done by State Records and is up on their website. Very convenient.

Now with this system, after you have decided which heading to use you then use a particular procedure to merge the headings. A bit of a misnomer because the headings remain, the records attached are transferred to another heading. Then you delete the heading with no records attached. Anyway, the latest name on the system is ok. No duplicates. I put a scope note on it giving the years it's been used, the preceding name, and where I got the info from. Nice.

Go back one name and there's eight headings of various sorts. My theory is that someone was trying their hand at cataloguing and didn't understand the difference between an authority heading and a statement of responsibility. Ok, I pick the best and I start merging the rest. I discover the system can't transfer the largest number of headings, about 750, it just grinds to a halt. It also ties up the whole system so we can't use it on other computers either. Ok shut that down. I decide to set up the job as I'm leaving work (except that I forgot tonight) and leave my computer on overnight. Maybe it will be done in the morning. I also can't edit a heading with a lot of records on it. Grinds to a halt.

I ring our main contact for the system and explain what I'm doing which she seems really enthusiastic about at first. Then I mention merging the headings and she says it isn't working. Oh. Something had been said to me by my lib'n but she is so unsure about technology that she didn't explain it well enough and I thought she meant something else. She didn't tell me not to do mergings. This is an amazing bug - turns out instead of deleting the incorrect heading and adding the correct heading it actually doesn't add the correct heading at all and it multiplies the incorrect heading (they think) by the number of records that held the heading. If 40 records had that heading each of those records will have that heading listed 40 times. I haven't counted them to confirm that.

The only way to fix it is to manually open up each record, delete the wrong heading (it only takes one delete for all the multiple headings, thank goodness!) and add the correct heading.

I have a total of nearly 900 records.

But wait there's more! When you are looking at the heading in the thesaurus the records are listed under the heading. They can be opened and edited from there.

The heading can't see them. The total number of records attached to it is wrong.

Each time I edit a record and correct the heading the total number on the authority record goes up by one.

This is one of the most amazing bugs I've seen. It's going to take a couple of weeks to clean up the mess. It's not too slow, I've cleaned well over a hundred today and reached the end of the Cs.

That will teach me to go looking for work.

It's going to be some time before this bug is fixed I'm told. This job use to work because I use to do it a few months ago. I won't be doing any large scale fixing of headings for some time.

The manager came into the library and talked for at least 20 minutes with the lib'n and they both remained calm! From the bits I could hear it actually sounded like they were agreeing and being constructive! And when the manager left the lib'n didn't bitch!! I don't know what to make of this, I don't really trust it, it feels a little like the calm before the storm. I find it so hard to believe that they have worked everything out and found some common ground so easily. Time will tell, but I'll just enjoy this while it lasts.