• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
[From Alan Exelby on ALEPH

Can anyone who imports LC authorities into Aleph advise re. this one, please. Any thoughts appreciated.

We are in the middle of a major recataloguing project on a very tight schedule, and have just received our first sample batch of LC authorities; we have found a concern about LC authorities with $w in the 4xx field, and how this is interpreted by tab20. We cannot test this until much nearer the go-live deadline, so I need to understand what will happen without testing, and it's not easy.

I copy below what tab20 says about this (columns 5 and 6) together with a sample of the set-up from usm01. The SLG section on Authorities does not add anything to the explanation, though I note that it shows a slightly different set-up for the second pair of rows (in usm01 column 6 is '!!!', in the SLG it is '!!! *').

My query is: this is supposed to displays xrefs where the "fourth position of sub-field $w contains a blank or contains an 'n' (or the sub-field does not exist)", and as far as I can read tab20, the table does this and this alone; but what happens when the subfield exists but has less than four characters? The definition does not seem to cover this, but the implication seems to be that the xref would not be displayed. I see numerous cases in our sample file where $w has just one character, where we definitely would want that xref to display.

Also, which is the correct setting for column 6 second pair: '!!!' or '!!! *'

Resolution:
[From Randy Menakes:]

The ‘!!! *’ form is obsolete and should no longer be used. If you want to match a subfield $$w with any values in positions one, two, and three, and a blank in position four, use ‘!!!’

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013