Month: November 2014

I complain a lot about the MARC format, the way people put data in MARC records, the actual data themselves I find in MARC records, the inexplicably complex syntax for identifiers and, ironically, attempts to replace MARC with something else. One nice little beacon of hope was when I found that only roughly 0.26% of the ISBNs in the UMich catalog have invalid checksums. That’s not bad at all, and it’s worth digging into other things about which I might be likely to complain before I make a fool of myself. [Note: there will be some complaining at the end.…