[Metadatalibrarians] Qualified DC to MARCXML

[Thompson, Kelly J [LIB]]

Hi, Amber et al.,

I'm the metadata manager at Iowa State (where the ETD_CON tool was developed - by a really great student employee who has now since graduated) and I just want to give you all a heads-up about a bug we've recently learned about with the XSLT the student wrote for that tool.

I don't administer that tool or anything (our repository coordinator does that) but I do work with our old ETD metadata a lot (we bought back our backfiles from the UMI microfilm scanning project, just wrapping up processing ~15,200 documents) and I've been pulled in to help troubleshoot the ETD_CON error.
The way the original XSLT was written does not handle the embargo dates correctly (ProQuest placed their embargo code in the root element as an attribute, and that's what the XPath pointed to, oops!).  Since we discovered that original bug, we've also learned that ProQuest has changed how they format the embargo dates in their XML, and in that transition, there is a period of time from where they were spitting out buggy XML with embargo dates in incorrect places. I've corrected the XSLT (which still only exists locally), but while I was testing it in the tool I noticed that because I've updated my computer to Java version 8 since the last time I ran the program, that it is now throwing an XPath Object error.  I'm working with our IT folks to (hopefully!) patch that up, but don't know a timeline.  I've suggested to our repository coordinator that it might be responsible to share this information on the repository page with the ETD_CON download, but haven't seen any action on that front... If you'd like my updated XSLT in the meantime, I can certainly email that to you.

We haven't been adding the records for new ETDs into our ILS, although we have hand-crafted, artisanal, locally grown records for all of the documents which were cataloged prior to 2008 when we switched to ProQuest for digital deposit. I can definitely see a future where we do add those records programmatically, so I'd love to hear if the ProQuestXML to MARC with MarcEdit works for you.  Terry Reese's tools have been such a help in my work!

I also just wanted to share that I just found out about this listserv about two weeks ago, and I am so excited to have found people who spend their time trying to solve some of the same puzzles I think about.  :)

Thanks,
Kelly

Kelly J Thompson, MLIS
(pronouns: she, her, hers)
Metadata Management and Cataloging Librarian
Iowa State University Library
kellyt at iastate.edu<mailto:kellyt at iastate.edu>
ORCID: 0000-0002-3812-8910<http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3812-8910>