MARC Report 236: Program changes

Note: In version 240 of MARC Report, several hundred additional catchecks for RDA/MARC have been added to the program. Because of this, it is no longer feasible to comprehensively list RDA catchecks here. The best place to view the totality of RDA cataloging checks is in the program itself (Go to the Cataloging Check editor on the 'Cataloging Check' page of the Options).

The following four points, labelled 'RDA', are intended to be read in the order in which they are listed.

• RDA effect on Cataloging Check Options: The format of the files used to save cataloging check customizations has been changed. If applicable, the first time you visit the options, the program will prompt you to update the format of these files. For a complete description on this important change, please visit this page.
• RDA: A new option named 'Description rules support' has been added to the cataloging checks page. This may be set to 'Follow 040' (the default), 'AACR Only', or 'RDA Only'. Read more about how you might use this new option here.
• RDA: Approximately 60 cataloging checks have been added to support RDA in MARC21: Click here for details
• RDA Toolkit links: if you have a toolkit subscription, you may now access the Toolkit and link to RDA instructions from the 'MARC Help' page in MARC Report: Click here for details

Note: no changes to support RDA have yet been made to the other tables on the Cataloging Checks page of the options¹⁾; if we decide this will be beneficial, we will update these tables in 237.

• The function key used to pop-up the MARC Help window in MARC Report has been changed from F3 to F1.
• When using F11 to add a template record to an edit session, the program will now automatically select the last template opened; the purpose of this is to speed up the repeated adding of template records to an edit session.
• A new option named 'Display MARC positions in FF labels' was added to the 'Record display' page; this option is selected by default. Turning this option off will remove the numeric offsets from fixed field labels.
• The program's MARC Help (available when you press F1) now includes entries for Obsolete tags and data elements. The text '–OBSOLETE' will be appended to the caption for each obsolete data element.
• A new cataloging check was added to check for mis-coded publication dates: if subfields $a, $b, $c are present in the 260 field, and subfield $c does not contain 'YYYY', an error message will be displayed.
• A new cataloging check was added to check the subfield order in field 260.
• The phrase 'online resource' has been added to list of strings considered valid by cataloging checks that compare the 300 $a with the record type.
• The option to check for the presence of Subject Headings in fiction records has been made more flexible. Click here for details
• The default diacritics menu (accessed using Ctrl-I in 236; F3 in version 3) is now sorted in order by the name of the diacritic, with the two new required RDA symbols for copyright and phonograph copyright at the top. (In the past it was sorted on the character code value, which made sense to a programmer, but not to any users). If you have customized the file keycodes.txt this sort order will not appear.

• An option was added to the Import utility to make it possible to dequote a string when importing text exported as columns (Excel, for example, often wraps strings in quotes when saving a table as tab-delimited text).
• In MARC Review/MARC Global, bypassing the validation of the data entry form has been made easier– Click here for details
• An option has been added to MARC Review/MARC Global that will automatically load the last review that was executed when the utility starts.²⁾.
• Several new statistics have been added to MARC Analysis in 236.
• The options form for the MARC-to-XML and XML-to-MARC conversion utilities was redesigned, hopefully making these utilities easier to use. The main change was to add the XSL stylesheet option to the main form.
• In recent versions, the 'Concatenate Files' utility would attempt to support XML file concatenation by removing the XML declarations (from all files but the first) and wrapping the results in a new document element. This approach was misguided, and thus, for now, this 'special' handling of XML files has been discontinued; a raw concatenation will now be performed instead (as it is with any other type of file).
• Two options were added to the Text Export page on the MARC Review Output options form; One is called 'Occs', which will include tag occurrence numbers in the output, and the other is called 'Blank around subs', which will output a blank space before and after each subfield code. The first option is designed for Custom and Full record output rather than one-line output.
• Adds a new option to the Sort/Dedupe utility that makes it possible to customize the sorting of leading subfields (eg. force an 856 beginning with $3 to follow an 856 beginning with $u). A few details here.