Update and plan

Well, I took a week off last week from my internship because Ralph was on vacation. I probably should have spent more time doing some literature abstracts, but it didn't happen. My cataloging prowess has increased, however, due to some inadvertent mistakes I made doing catalog maintenance two weeks ago. It all started when OCLC added a death date to the name authority record for Nino Rota, an Italian composer whose most notable work comes in the realm of film music. He did the score for The Godfather and a bunch of Frederico Fellini films. Anyway, he's dead, and the good people at OCLC updated the name authority record and all his name/title records, adding that death date. Well, our catalog didn't have these updated records, so I had the joy of updating them. This is more work than I realized, and became even more work after I learned that I had made a slight error in updating both the authority and bibliographic files.

It turns out I forgot to include a period at the end of the {100} and {700} name/title entries on the bib records because while a person is alive and has a birth date in the NAR, the dash at the end of the string of text requires that one leave off the period. Then, on the authority files, I forgot that rather than simply updating the name on each of the name/title records in our local ILS, I should have matched and loaded the updated name/title records from OCLC. Ralph got an email from the database managers in the main library on the day after I "fixed" Nino Rota, asking if I worked for the music library, and why I had thoroughly screwed up. Perhaps I exaggerate here, but I was certainly a little embarrassed. 128 updates later, however, and Nino Rota is fixed and ready to live out the rest of eternity in our ILS, death date updated on every record we have for him.

Unfortunately, I've gotten a little behind in my hours for this internship. I have 53 more hours to go, and lots of work still to do. I think I can do it before I go on vacation in mid August, so we'll shoot for that and hope for the best. I still have four or five literature abstracts to do, but those shouldn't be too terribly difficult.