CODOC TO MARC CONVERSION IN A BILINGUAL UNIVERSITY-LIBRARY - DEVELOPING A METHODOLOGY TO REDUCE DATA-ENTRY REVISION

The purpose of this article is to outline the conversion of 91,443 government publication records from an existing machine-readable file using the CODOC record format in a bilingual library setting; the conversion resulted in a significant reduction in data entry revision. The project was completed in May 1990 and involved coordinating the programming efforts of staff from Laurentian University, Avec Technical Services Inc. (Mississauga), DGH Consulting (Guelph) and Sobeco (Montreal). Each phase of the record conversion project is described, detailing the problems encountered and their resolution. Three primary obstacles subsequently resolved during the project were (a) the incompatibility between the database record formats, (b) the reformating of all CODOC file records to upper and lower case character format, and (c) the addition of diacritics to 25,656 records in the CODOC file having none. The problems associated in establishing bilingual authority control and equivalent headings (English and French) for personal, corporate, and series entries for government documents are outlined. The methodology and techniques used to extract and create a unique word list from an existing file, and the subsequent revision and use of the unique word list to change records in the original file, may be applicable for other libraries wishing to convert existing machine-readable records into databases having MARC-compatible record structures. © 1991.