Re: Importing Authorities from * LC *

[Kyle Banerjee <kyle.banerjee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:47 AM 10/9/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Has anyone worked out efficient procedures for importing authority
>records from the LC Authorities site (http://authorities.loc.gov/)?
>Back in the pre-Voyager days we (briefly) used Z39.50 to save LC
>authorities, but the routines for exporting & importing MARC records
>from the current setup appear to be extremely cumbersome.  If anyone is
>using the LC Authority file effectively in their ongoing work and is
>willing to share, we'd be delighted to benefit!

This is a great job for my favorite free MARC records took, MarcEdit 
http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.html

Here's how you get the records into your catalog:

1) Find the records you want, view them in the real MARC mode (the whole 
record appears on a single line)
2) Paste the records into a text file. Save the file when you have all the 
records you need
3) Use MarcEdit to convert the records to human readable text and make any 
modifications you like (MarcEdit can make global changes to all records if 
this is needed)
4) Convert back to MARC
5) MarcEdit can load all the records directly into your catalog through the 
gateway export, Novell print queue, or LPT port

If you don't need to modify the records, you can simply save them to a file 
and zap them into the catalog. Note that if you use the latest version of 
IE, it will put garbage HTML in the record, effectively corrupting it. As 
such, the process becomes:

1) Find the records and view in MARC mode
2) Paste into a text file and save
3) Transfer into III with MarcEdit

For subsequent records, just keep the text file open and overwrite the 
previous record when performing the process.

kyle


***********************************************
Kyle Banerjee
Oregon State Library
250 Winter ST
Salem, OR 97301-3950
(503)378-4243 ext. 260
kyle.banerjee@xxxxxxxxxx