The Letter L

As I continue on my journey through the alphabet in search of duplicates in the MassCat catalog, I recently reached the letter L.

The duplicate report sorts oddly, however; it ignores initial articles regardless of language. Therefore, the first several titles began with L' or La. I've come to understand the sorting idiosyncrasies of the Koha system and I just proceed as usual: I enter a distinctive word in a keyword search, sort by title A-Z, and look for things that need fixing.

The Koha system in general and the MassCat system in particular were upgraded a few weeks ago. Besides a slightly different display, which I like, there is a major difference that makes my job easier.

When merging duplicates, the procedure is to highlight all possibilities and put them into a separate file, a list called RecordsToMerge. They are still available to view in the main catalog, but in this other file I can view them side by side. Then I go into that list, choose the two I want to look at, check carefully to make sure they are, in fact, exact duplicates, and merge them. The operative word in the previous sentence is "two"; I can only look at two records at a time. Usually that is not a problem, but sometimes there are three, four, or even more possible duplicates. In those cases, I choose two, view them, merge; choose two more, view them, merge, etc.

With the new upgrade, I can now choose ALL of the records at the same time. I can only see two at a time side-by-side, but it's easy enough to select which one I think is the best (because the new display gives me more information), and then compare that record with the next, and the next, and the next, by clicking on the different tabs. When I'm sure they are all exactly the same, I click on the "merge" button and - poof! - they are now one.

This feature is especially helpful with the collection of a member library that previously used a very simple online catalog. These simple catalogs required each item have its own bib record even if it was a 20 volume set of an encyclopedia. The records read "Blah, blah encyclopedia, vol.1", "Blah, blah encyclopedia, vol.2", "Blah, blah encyclopedia, vol.3",etc.

What I can do now is find a good record for the 20 volume set, overlay the record for volume 1, put all 20 records into the RecordsToMerge list, and merge them into one record with the click of the mouse. Then I get to record 19 merges on my statistics sheet. That's the best part!