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2023 AskQC office hours

Find office hour recordings and supporting materials for 2023 AskQC office hours.

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November 2023: MARC Fields for Manuscripts and Archival Collections

Description

Have you ever wondered when to use field 535 or how to record a URI for a finding aid? How about providing a preferred citation for a manuscript? Kate James will provide information on these and other topics related to MARC bibliographic records for manuscripts and archival collections. Fields covered will include 340, 351, 524, 535, 545, 561, and 856.

October 2023: Meeting librarians where they are today: incorporating linked data into existing library workflows

Description

Librarians are at various stages of linked data adoption. From novice to expert and skeptic to true believer. OCLC's linked data will help bridge the gap for librarians still working to understand linked data and will also demonstrate value added to current and future library workflows. We will talk about our linked data vision as well as practical ways to apply linked data to library work today. We will also give a brief demo of our WorldCat Entities data and data editor, explaining how this linked data authority work can be immediately applied to current bibliographic cataloging workflows.

September 2023: Get Informed about Genre/Form Terms

Description

Kate James presented on genre/form terms, describing how these differ from subject headings and how to use the 655 field to record the terms, including how to specify the source of the term with examples from common thesauri such as LCGFT and AAT. She also explained the benefit of including genre/form information in a record.

Support material

August 2023: Rapid Harm Reduction with Locally Preferred Subjects in WorldCat Discovery

Description

Grace McGann will present on locally preferred subjects in WorldCat Discovery. This feature enables libraries to rapidly reduce harm in item description by defining local, inclusive subjects for display.

July 2023: Debiasing Dewey: Righting the past by rewriting the classification

Description

OCLC is working to address historic biases in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and ensure its continuing relevance. Hear from senior editor Alex Kyrios and editor-in-residence Kathryn Becker about some of the work in recent years, especially on topics related to LGBTQ people.

June 2023: Cataloging Rare Materials Defensively

Description

The eighth and final “Cataloging Defensively” presentation is designed to provide background about how OCLC’s Duplicate Detection and Resolution (DDR) software deals with WorldCat bibliographic records created for rare and archival materials. The webinar will help catalogers use MARC 21 and the instructions in RDA to the best advantage in making sure that DDR performs appropriately when encountering a record that is legitimately unique according to the descriptive conventions.

May 2023: What's in a name?: Descriptive access points overview

Description

Bryan Baldus and Becky Dean presented a review of name and title descriptive access points, and how OCLC's controlling functionality works with each type of name.

April 2023: Data and algorithms and bibs, oh my!

Description

Laura Ramsey and Nathan Putnam present on OCLC’s latest work in the effort to harness machine learning and data science to improve WorldCat quality, with explanations and descriptions of OCLC’s existing data algorithms and experiments with Machine Learning (ML), specifically in reducing the number of duplicates in WorldCat.

March 2023: Languages, Non-Latin Scripts and Mysterious MARC 880 fields

Description

You asked for some tips on cataloging non-English language materials.  We’ll provide information on coding and recording languages in MARC records, the fields and subfields to pay attention to for non-English cataloging, and special handling of non-Latin data.  And we’ll talk about correct coding for language of cataloging, an element often coded incorrectly in WorldCat bibliographic records.

February 2023: Bibliographic Formats and Standards (BFAS), the early chapters

Description

You know BFAS (OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards) is great for looking up individual MARC field, but did you know there are 5 chapters before you even get to the MARC field section? Have you ever looked up a MARC field and wondered how it should be used? Or wondered where to ask for cataloging change requests? In this overview, Robin Six and Charlene Morrison will walk through the first 5 chapters which cover an introduction to BFAS, online cataloging, special cataloging guidelines, when to input a new record, and quality assurance.

Previous Virtual AskQC Office Hours presentations on specific areas of OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards