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Presentation
Mining the Blob: There’s Gold in the Directory!
ELUNA (Ex Libris Users of North America) Meeting (2014)
  • Kathryn Lybarger, University of Kentucky
Abstract
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 to learn more about the data in my catalog.
Keywords
  • BLOB,
  • Binary large object,
  • Library catalog,
  • Metadata,
  • MARC
Publication Date
May 1, 2014
Comments

A presentation at the ELUNA (Ex Libris Users of North America) Conference in Montreal, QC, Canada on May 1, 2014.

Citation Information
Kathryn Lybarger. "Mining the Blob: There’s Gold in the Directory!" ELUNA (Ex Libris Users of North America) Meeting (2014)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kathrynlybarger/28/