Delete "1 online resource" from Alt Length

Does anyone else opposite-of-love encountering "1 online resource" or "1 online resource (audio (" in the Alt Length field before the runtime?

Has anyone found a way to clean up the Alt Length (aka MARC 300) field? I know one could create a in Excel to save the contents between the parentheses so that only the runtime: "## hours, ## minutes" would remain. But I don't know how one could do this in KLAS.

They seem to be most prevalent in DBCs and DBGs.

Any thoughts or clean-up tricks?

-Dan in Minnesota

Like a certain creature once said, "we hates it." I have asked about this, and the issue is that the text is actually in the subfield along with the playback time, so it is imported. The new upload program compensates for this, but we are out of luck with the retrospective items. Reloading them using the new upload program would fix it, but then would undo any work you have done.

I don't know any clean up tricks. I just clean 'em up as I edit records. I delete anything superfluous. I delete "0 minutes". I fix "1 hours" so it says "1 hour". etc. etc.

James, are you saying if I manually downloaded MARC records from Voyager and imported them into KLAS, the runtime would load without the "1 online resource" stuff? Not that that process would be faster than manually editing the field.

It wouldn't be as bad if the GUI would stop clipping the text. The word "minutes" and the closing parenthesis always get clipped and you need to finish typing "minutes" in order to make things right. (I'm sure this sounds lazy or whiny to complain about this, but anyone who catalogs lots of records knows that collectively these manual, micro updates waste time.)

I wish Keystone would create an import query with Find and Replace capabilities. You provide the KLAS ID and the single MARC field you want to overwrite or delete portions of. In this case, BEGINS "1 online resource" or ENDS ")". Replace with nothing/DELETE.

I would love this for updating the 260 and 269 fields (Alt Publisher/Alt Place), too. Since MN1A moved, I see I see inconsistencies, like our old city shows up on newer books, or we get credit for books made by our machine lending agency in St. Paul. It's admittedly nonessential data for our automated service, but it'd be nice to clean up pinpointed fields and make data consistent. With an import query it'd be insanely fast to make things right.

Yes, Katharina suggested this cleanup to me, and I have one of our staff doing it. It's a long-term project for someone who wants to help and needs a solid task that does not take cataloging skills. I welcomed the suggestion!

Nancy gave me a query-on-length to use, and I made a doc with screenshots of how-to, and sent a bunch of queries by KLAS ID. (DB06 first half, DB06 second half, DB07...) of those to do that had the words in the line. 

She also said, "My query brought back over 41K titles with this wording.  It took a little while to come up.  I might suggest that you do your query in smaller increments.  I've attached a screen shot of my set up.  You could do KLASID - begins - DB06 for example, to work on those titles, rather than having it return the entire 41,000 titles with begins DB."

Good luck!
Maureen in FL

Dan:

To answer your question, yes, reloading a MARC file will update and replace what is in your system. You can use the NEW program or NTWRK (if it is a DBC/BRC). I do this a lot with some of our older braille records, since they were loaded in so long ago that most of the fields are missing or jumbled.

Good news! I just successfully tested this in a training database.(*) There is a way to use the Load External Titles File tool to update the Alt Length field. It does involve setting up a cross reference and having a spreadsheet with the data you want updated. If you are interested, send us an email at and I'll set up that xref and give you particulars for the spreadsheet column names.
If you get the KLAS cataloging service I'd say creating the spreadsheet is part of that service, just send an email to let me know if you'd like me to update your alt lengths.
~Katharina

(*) Ok, one caveat, out of the 19 test titles I updated only 1 didn't also update the 300 MARC tag (even though it did update on the Title-Bib). Resaving the Title-Bib then forced the Marc to update.