Two Women in New York City

Molly Murphy emigrated from Ireland in the late 1800s under awkward circumstances; she was running away from a possible criminal charge. The landowner's son had tried to take advantage of her and she fought back. Fearing for her freedom and maybe her life, she left.

Now it's the early 1900s and in this seventh novel of author Rhys Bowen's mystery series, Molly (who started a detective agency early on) is very busy going undercover as a street urchin, an extra in a Broadway play, and a mental patient. She has fun and quirky friends that help her get into (and, fortunately, out of) difficult situations.

Reading about Molly and the early days of the city is fun and interesting. The historical details seem accurate. This particular story took place in winter and now I'm looking forward to one that happens in warmer weather.

Just a few year later, in the 1920s, Lillian Boxfish arrived in the Big Apple. Of course, it wasn't called that at the time.This is a title that was listed in Wowbrary - a service to which the my local Public Library subscribes. Every Wednesday morning I receive an email that lists the new books, DVDs, etc. that have arrived at the library and I can reserve whichever one(s) interests me. This one did.

The story takes place on New Year's Eve (winter again) 1984 and 85-year-old Lillian has a dinner reservation at her favorite neighborhood restaurant. Lillian loves to walk around New York, even at night, even when it's cold, and she ends up taking a long stroll from the Murray Hill area where she lives to Wall Street, to Penn Station and ultimately back home. Throughout the evening, she remembers different roles of her life (career woman, friend, wife, mother, ex-wife, mental patient, and many others) and has some unusual adventures along the way. This book is a delight to read.

Take a walk with Lillian sometime soon. You won't regret it.

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!