Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Mining The Blob: There’S Gold In The Directory!, Kathryn Lybarger

Library Presentations

When running reports from Voyager, we usually focus on the fields deemed important enough to index, and avoid the blob version of the MARC records whenever possible. For some questions, however, the blob is not just the only way to the answer, but a surprisingly fast way as well. Though MARC is mainly used as a method to communicate bibliographic data, the format itself contains an index that can be used to quickly determine the broad shape of a record's content. In this talk, I will describe several projects in which I have specifically taken advantage of MARC's directory format …