Hang Fire

When I keyed "hang fire" into the Google.com search box, what appeared was "delay or be delayed in taking action or progressing". That's a perfect definition for my situation - especially the progressing part.

As I've said before on this blog, I have an alphabetical list of potential duplicate records. I search the MassCat catalog to determine if, indeed, they are duplicates. Sometimes they are. Sometimes not; the title and author are the same, but one is perhaps large print, another a mass market paperback and yet another the audio version. Between the less-than-perfect bib records and the idiosyncratic way that Koha sorts those records, potential duplicates don't always end up one after the other. They may be several records apart and not always easy to find. Sometimes they'll be on different "pages". Each bit of punctuation affects the sorting: Fire and Fire! do not end up near each other.

The way I search for duplicates (and other problems) in the catalog is to use my alphabetical list as a guideline. Instead of searching the entire title, I do a keyword search on one word of the title and the author's first or last name, depending which is faster and easier to type.

This can be a pretty boring job at times. They way to keep myself interested is to make a game of it - which is how "hang fire" came about. There were several titles beginning with the word Fire. I decided to key in that one word and see what happened.

The first thing is that I got a list of over 3200 titles matching that search. This was a keyword search, remember. The word "Fire" can be anywhere in the record. Unfortunately, Koha only searches the first 1000 titles, so I knew I couldn't get to that middle 1000 easily. I sorted by title A-Z and began to look for duplicates, typos, funky characters that should be accent marks, incomplete records, and any other bib record in need of a cataloger's attention. I found plenty - hence "hang fire". I've been working on variations of this search for over a week! 

Here is one of the things I found: 3 records for Oscar Handlin's Fire bell in the night, although one was spelled Fire-ball in the night. There is now one record, spelled correctly.

When I finally reached record #1000, I resorted by title Z-A and worked backwards through another 1000. After merging all of the duplicate records (now there are only about 3100 or so), I resorted A-Z, went to record  #940, looked through that last batch and found a few more things to take care of. I resorted Z-A and did the same from the other end.

At that point, I went back to my duplicate list and did slightly more detailed searches (usually 2 title words and one of the author's names) on each title listed to make sure I hadn't missed anything in that massive scanning. While I never did get to that middle 1000 records, I can definitely say there are now fewer records and they are cleaner and more complete. 

Isn't that what it's all about? Now on to firefighter, firefighting, etc. It will be a while before I get to the letter "G".

Author J.D. Robb

I just finished reading my first book by J.D. Robb -  Brotherhood in Death. I think it will be my last. I didn't like it for a variety of reasons. However, being an OCD-ish type person, I did read the entire book.

The first thing I didn't like is that it's set in 2060 and for whatever reason, I'm just not that interested in futuristic literature. The second thing is that I couldn't see the purpose for setting the story in the future. It didn't add to the plot except that the detective could use a voice command to ask her computer to perform a search on a given set of criteria. She could also use a voice command to turn on the lights 10% or 25% or however bright she wanted them.

I also didn't like the writing style of the dialog. It seemed a little forced, as if it had to be different because this all takes place 44 years from now. For example, a computer is always referred to as  "comp", a witness is a "wit". All of the characters talk on what I can only assume is a cell phone with video (or "vid") capabilities called a 'link. The specifics of the 'link (or what it is an abbreviation for) are left to the imagination of the reader. When Lieutenant Eve Dallas of the NYPSD (the S is never defined, but according to Wikipedia is Security) gets caught in traffic, she goes "vertical" - but again, no details.

The story takes place in New York City sometime after the Urbans. The Urbans are never explained and even Wikipedia did not have any information about it or them. Admittedly, I only did a very quick search. Still I shouldn't have to hunt down details like that.

Eve is foul-mouthed. I regularly use expletives, but Eve goes way beyond my comfort zone. She's just not a person with whom I can identify, and I think that is something I look for in pleasure reading. I much prefer Kinsey Millhone, V.I. Warshawski, and the lawyers at Rosato and Associates. I live vicariously through them.

I've just begun a thriller: Find Her by Lisa Gardner. While pretty brutal (Brotherhood in Death was also pretty brutal), I'm already finding this book much more to my taste.

Funky letters

The English language doesn't have any accent marks except on the words that have been borrowed (or should that be usurped since I don't think we're going to return them) like facade (which should have a cedilla since it is French) or Noel (which should have an umlaut, but you rarely see it with one). In the library world, accent marks are called diacritics.

Now that we have word processing programs, those diacritics are often automatically added by the computer software (but not in Blogger, I guess, since they did not pop in).

Since libraries often have books (and other materials, of course) in languages other than English, and usually have books (and other materials) written by or acted by people with names that require diacritics, you'll see many cedillas and umlauts as well as acute or grave accents, and rings (which I thought was called an angstrom but, according to Wikipedia, that is a unit of measure). Depending on the software a particular library uses for its catalog, these accent marks may or may not display correctly.

When bib records are transferred from one program to another (such as Koha, which is used by MassCat), the correct coding for those accent marks may or may not be transferred correctly.

One of the things I do at work is to look for funky characters (that's letters, not people). As I scan the list of brief records looking for duplicates and misspellings (remember the Portuguese Picket Dictionary?) I look for misplaced symbols like ? or @ in the middle of words. That usually signals there should be some sort of accent mark over or under or through a letter. Often I can tell what it should be, but since all of these programs translate the codes differently, I'm not always sure.

Fortunately, it's easy for me to correct these - what should I call them? - mis-translations when I find them. I actually have a word document with all of the different possibilities of letters with accent marks. I simply copy and paste over the offending symbol. Or if it's someone's name and I'm not certain what it should be, I go to WorldCat.org, search the part I do know, and copy and paste the correction.

If  only all of life's problems could be solved so easily.