MARC Report 242: Program Enhancements

Whether or not this feature will have a long future is questionable, but … we have added a macro to Edit sessions that will add the 336, 337, and 338 tags to the current record whenever F10 is pressed.

In addition, if a record already has 336, 337, and/or 338 fields, we have made it much easier to edit these fields by adding drop-down lists to each one. Simply click on the text for the field to activate these lists.

The macro support is active both in the default MARC view, and in Text View–but no drop-down lists of terms and codes will be available in Text view.

We are trying to design this feature so that the correct terms and codes are added to these fields without user intervention¹⁾. If the record lacks sufficient data for the hybridization routine to make a decision, default template data will be displayed.

A small panel of options to support this new feature has been added to the 'Views' tab of the Options.

For more details on how both the macro and the dropdown lists work, please click here.

Version 242 also adds another type of dropdown list that supports the various MARC Codelists. This dropdown codelist is activated by pressing F7 in the appropriate context.

For example, if you are adding an author, and type '±4' and then press F7, a list of relator codes will pop-up; similarly, if you are adding an 041, and type '±a' and then press F7, the MARC Language codelist will display.

But if you press F7 when the cursor is positioned in the '±a' or '±d' (i.e., there is no codelist appropriate to that context), then no list will pop-up.

The context for the codelist is determined by the current cursor location from two attributes:

1. the tag of the field
2. the subfield to the left of the cursor

We hope to add support to this feature in the future for the many RDA vocabulary lists that are now available, but in this release, only the MARC Codelists are supported.

For more details, please visit this link.

Subject validation is an experimental feature added in 242. When this option (on the Program Automation tab) is selected, the program will attempt to validate subject headings in edit sessions. By default, it is not selected.

By 'experimental' we mean that we are testing the functionality and feasibility of real-time validation of data via HTTP. Subjects were chosen because the amount of data needed is relatively small and manageable²⁾. <!–The ultimate objective is to provide real-time validation of name headings. But the dataset needed for that project is too large for our current server resources. Hence this 'experiment'.–>

This feature can be quickly turned on and off inside an Edit Session by clicking the new 'S' button on the (bottom right of the) navigation panel. If you want to quickly scroll through a file of records be sure to toggle this option off. The program will not advance to the next record in the file until it receives the search results from the server for the current record. Also note, this functionality is not active in Batch mode.

For more details on this project, please click here.