MARC Usage in WorldCat

[Lawrence, Dan]

Absolutely fascinating, thank you for the work and sharing it.  Among other things, this will go a long way toward helping us determine the feasibility of mapping to SEO-focused formats in discovery.

Are there any reports (or intentions/dreams to do so) that can attempt to get at disaggregating these numbers based on the type of institution with holdings (say, public, or academic)?

Or even, user behavior in the searching of these fields in Worldcat?

Best,
-Dan

Dan Lawrence | Director, Networking and Resource Sharing |  State Library |  Colorado Department of Education | 201 E. Colfax Ave., Room 309, Denver, CO  80203| tel 303.866.6907 | cell 720.484.1936 | Lawrence_D at cde.state.co.us<mailto:Lawrence_D at cde.state.co.us> | ColoradoStateLibrary.org<http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdelib/> |

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Roy Tennant
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2013 10:34 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [WEB4LIB] MARC Usage in WorldCat

I have been working on a project for the past year in which I have informed discussions focused on metadata and cataloging about my progress. This announcement is going out to a much wider community in case there are others who are interested.

After about 40 years of using the MARC standard for metadata transfer, and with various activities now underway to move this data into new kinds of environments, it seems like a good time to inspect the data we have on hand.

Toward this end, I have reported on the actual usage of MARC tags and subfields in WorldCat on a quarterly basis for the past year (there are now over 300 million MARC records in the database). Although the formal, and accurate, title of the project is "MARC Usage in WorldCat", I informally call it my "ground truthing" activity.

"Ground truthing" is the process whereby geographic remote sensing data is verified or enhanced by on-the-ground observation and measurement. Over the past year I have performed a similar function for library cataloging. We have used the MARC standard for many decades, but how, exactly? Which elements and subfields have actually been used, and more importantly, how?

The site at <http://experimental.worldcat.org/marcusage/> provides field and subfield counts as well as the specific contents of some subfields ordered by number of occurrences. There are also visualizations of this data available.

Besides providing a basis of evidence for use in determining opportunities and challenges in moving our data into new encodings, this work has already helped inform our ongoing data quality work at OCLC.

I also entertain requests for reports on specific subfields, just email me to request or use the link at the bottom of any page on the web site. Thanks,
Roy Tennant
OCLC Research

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