MARC Report 252: Program changes

Added an option to the MARC Help form (activated by pressing F1) to increase/decrease the size of the text. It will stick to your preference once it is set.

A new report type was added to MARC Analysis. Its called 'Tag Summary' and its located on the 'Output' page of the utility's options (at the bottom of the summary lists). What it does is simply repeat the main stats for each tag, without going into the details; so a nice tabular format is generated–one row for each tag, with columns for RecordsFoundIn, TotalOccurrences, MaxOccurrences, TotalSize, AverageSize, Longest, and Shortest. There is an also an option to output this summary as a separate file (the default is to append it to the analysis report).

When defining the fields for a Title-list view, the program would always sort the fields entered by tag, regardless of the order that they were entered. Thus, in order to display the report in a different order, the user was required to manually change the column order after the list was created. The program will now maintain the entry order of the fields for title-list. In addition, fields in an existing definition can be re-ordered via drag and drop. Finally, a horizontal scrollbar was added to the title-list view (as it was awkward to access later columns if the definition contained more than three fields).

The controls for the Title-list view have been cleaned up a bit, and two options have been added to make it possible to generate a text report that reflects changes made to the view by filtering, row selection, column arrangement, and so on. These report capabilities are accessed via the new 'Options' dropdown list at the bottom of the form.

A new option named Enable cell hints in edit sessions was added to the Record display page of the options. When editing, and a field in a record is too large to be displayed in its entirety (for example, a long 505), the default behavior is to pop-up the field in a cell hint when the mouse is moved over it. Although this pop-up only lasts a few seconds, it might be distracting (or annoying, if the field is very, very large); hence this option, which makes it possible to disable the pop-up behavior.

Several cat checks that warned against using 3XX fields designed for Work and Expression data–even though defined for bib records–have been turned off in the default options. Let's hope having this data in bib records may be useful if/when records are converted into RDA Work or Expression linked data. NB. If you have customized your cataloging checks, you will need to update your custom sets manually if you want to implement this change. (The message Ids in question are: 23770001, 23800001, 23810001, 23830001, 23840001).

The database used to perform online validation of LCSH headings has been updated. Thanks to the Library of Congress for updating the linked data version of LCSH, and keeping it freely available.

The logic of a specific pattern syntax in MARC Review has been updated. The pattern referred to involves one Tag and an Occurrence, and uses the 'Not' Rule; eg. 'Tag=020 Occ=2 Rule=Not'. In the past (and possibly this was by design, since we have traced the issue back many years), this pattern would identify every 020 in a file except if it is the second occurrence of 020 in a record. Using the updated logic, this pattern will identify every record in a file that does not contain a second 020. The new logic is enabled by default. For more information, and/or to revert to the old logic, follow the instructions here. NB. This change does not affect MARC Global (nor any pattern specified as part of a MARC Global review)