Illuminate the dark arts of OPAC searching of MARC fields.

June 12, 2009 1:24 PM

Searching for MARC fields in Millennium OPAC 'Create Lists,' or, more precisely: how can I limit search results to classed serials?

This may be a little too specific for AskMe, but I know there are a lot of librarians here so it's worth a go, right? I am not yet a real librarian, so the finer points of bib. records and MARC rules are quite foggy to me.

My library is in the midst of a large transfer/withdraw project. We've been using Millennium to make our pull lists, and we can't seem to make it exclude classed serials. We'd love to be able to get them on their own, but I can't figure out how to do that with the Create Lists functions. Today I found that our classed serials have MARC indicators 490 and 830. I want to be able to perform my regular pull search and make it only return records that include or exclude both of those MARC types.

Here is the search methodology:

item : location : equals : our location
item : last check-in : before : 12/31/2000
bibliographic level : equal to : monograph
bibliographic : publication date : between : 1989-2000
item : total checkout : less than : 5


If anyone out there knows what I'm talking about and might have an idea of what I should try, please do tell. I'm just having one of those "THAT HAS TO BE POSSIBLE TO FIND" kind of days, and the manual isn't exactly illuminating.

posted by wowbobwow to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Best answer: I'm not sure I completely understand, so this might be a long shot.

Try this: bibliographic : MARC Tag 830 : does not equal : _________

That last section would be left blank. To bring up the MARC Tag, press an exclamation point (I believe), then type in the field number.
posted by aswego at 1:48 PM on June 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I believe aswego has it right. Seemed to work okay with the sample list I ran, anyway (though my library uses 490 and 830 for other serial statements, so you'd probably still need to run it against your other criteria).
posted by box at 1:58 PM on June 12, 2009

Uh, that is, aswego's search string returned everything that contained an 830 entry. If I understand correctly, you'd want to exclude those results.
posted by box at 2:00 PM on June 12, 2009

And I might be wrong about all this--lists are one of those things that I don't do often enough to ever quite get used to 'em.
posted by box at 2:01 PM on June 12, 2009

Best answer: It reads like you want to exclude any record that has a 490 or 830 field*.

@aswego's approach is a good start, but may be inverted. Perhaps this will work:

bibliographic : MARC Tag 830 : equals : _________

* I had to look them up:
http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/concise/bd490.html
http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/concise/bd830.html
posted by misterbisson at 7:40 PM on June 12, 2009

Response by poster: These are fantastic. I will try them out and report back when I get in on Monday. Thanks!!
posted by wowbobwow at 8:16 AM on June 13, 2009

Response by poster: Ok, I am back with more to clarify. Apparently 'serials' is too broad, I need to be only finding or excluding serials that are classed together under one LC number, but have separate bib records. For example, Methods in Enzymology are all cataloged with QP601 .M49 (vols. 1...-250). Each volume has it's own record. Looking at a summary of regular serials will contain all the volumes under one authority record. We need to exclude classed ones because we want all those volumes to stay together.

I hope that makes sense.
posted by wowbobwow at 11:26 AM on June 17, 2009