Tutorials, macros, and catalogs, oh my!

During the last two weeks I got caught up in creating online tutorials using Wink. I wanted to add audio narration to the tutorials I created and I was thinking of buying an inexpensive USB microphone to add to my gadget arsenal. I also began to use Wink to create an online manual for the procedures I use to ftp and import MARC record files into the online catalog. All good maven-y things to do.

Like the macros I've written to edit records in OCLC that take milli-seconds to run and add a handful of fields to a record, the tutorials take hours to edit, but play for a minute or less. Sometimes when I step back and think about all the lines of code in a macro, and all the time I've spent in the last ten years creating them, I wonder about costs versus the benefits. The benefits are not to be undervalued. The macros help to reduce errors and increase efficiency. One of the fields added by the macros is "patron-facing." It is a local field that contains a single subfield with a single-character value that drives the format icon and search filter/limit option. It's a pretty important bit of data. When someone searches for a popular work such as "The girl with the dragon tattoo," the pretty icons match the right records because the macros I created helped ensure the integrity of the data. If a patron limits their search to the DVD of the movie, they will be able to find it. The tutorials I am creating will help my co-workers learn how to save, edit, and use the macros. The end result makes a better experience for the patron who use the catalog to get what they want.

But it got me to thinking on this Sunday day, why do we need to add another local field to the record with an arbitrarily-assigned one-character code to drive format icons and search filters? Why can't the online catalog use the same MARC data my macros use? My macros assign the format value based on data found in various parts of the MARC record, and all I use is an OCLC-version of BASIC computer programming language to do it. As elegant as my macros are, and as much as I love, love, love creating them, tinkering with them, and getting thanks and accolades when they work for other people, in the end, it would be cleaner if the programs that display and index catalog information could extrapolate from the MARC data to drive the format icon display and search filters. More thoughts about the online catalog development in my next post. I might buy the microphone anyway, and I am still the Macro Maven.