I will contribute one particularly heartbreaking bit from my own current metadata saga - I'm in one of these hybrid museum/research library institutions where the library side has a aging MARC catalog with its own issues that I won't go into at the moment. The museum side has a commercial collection management database that recently changed names from ReDiscovery to Proficio. The good news about this database is that after some digging I uncovered an export method that is fairly free-form and allows me to write a template to export directly to MODS xml which is my intended middle ground between library and museum (the only trick is getting your hands on the Top Sekrit database field names). The bad - actually painful news was discovering how data that had been painstakingly entered by hand over 15 years into separated fields was being munged together as free text within the database. Nobody knew this was happening until I started trying to export data. So, for example, a name and its associated role and dates would have been entered into appropriate separate authority controlled fields in a data-entry form but then would be stuffed into a single field in the database. The only consolation is that they do stuff in some text delimiters that are (mostly) uncommon characters (pipes and underscores) so it is possible to break the fields back out, just very time consuming and prone to introducing errors. Lesson learned: vigorously test how well the data comes out of any system before investing any time putting data into it. Also invest in time travel to go back and apply this lesson at the beginning... -Derek @dmer On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Becky Yoose <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi all, > > For our preconference, “Digging into Metadata,” we’d like to get a little > discussion going to build on once the preconference rolls around. > > A good part of our discussion will focus on metadata issues and how folks > have worked through said issues or have utilized metadata in an unique way > while keeping the metadata’s context in mind. Some example include: > > - Dirty data issues when switching discovery layers or using legacy/vendor > metadata (ex. HathiTrust) > - Dealing with free text in MARC records and how to parse them w/o too much > heartache > - batch creating and editing metadata > > Some of you have already touched on this in the last preconference email > thread, but we'd like to get some more examples to focus on. What are your > metadata war stories? > > Thanks, > Becky > > --------------------- > Becky Yoose > Systems Librarian > Grinnell College