#libday8 Thursday

The fourth instalment in week long series of Library Day in the Life blog posts for Round 8.

Thursday was very focused on the data clean-up project I’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks. So I’m just going to blog about that rather than tell you about email enquiries and shelving again.

Im going through the database, programme by programme, cleaning up the records for each programme title and making sure the right assets are attached the right titles. At the end the only programme title records left should be the standardised records which are imported from a programme catalogue. One of the main problems  is many assets have been imputted into the system attached to title records which have been created manually rather than imported from the programme catalogue.

This week I’ve started looking at a music programme from the 80s. The records in our database are the complete opposite of standardised. Trying to figure out where to begin was hard, a bit like untangling a tangled up ball of wool. Thursday was a day of great progress. I began to untangle the mess and have made lots of progress with attaching asset records to the correct and standardised title records, and deleting any other records.

The task is lots of fun. Frustrating but satisfying to see how much easier it is to search for things. I’ve decided it’s like a big metadata jigsaw. Lots of information is missing and matching assets to titles can prove tricky. I’ve got a couple of spreadsheets with data extracted from our database, and one to keep track of all my workings out plus the database itself and our programme search which has details about the actual programmes (stuff like transmission dates and synopsis information plus information useful to this task such as production numbers) whereas our database is more about where the tapes for the programmes are kept or on loan to. I piece together data from all these sources to make the complete picture.