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The Collation

Folger Tooltips: Getting raw Hamnet data

Non-librarians out there, have you ever clicked the “MARC View” or “Staff view” link in an online catalog record? In Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog, it’s the third choice at the top of each record. Image of MARC View button I vividly remember the first time I did. It was back when I was building a relational database to manage my dissertation research (and back when I thought I wanted to be an Art History professor). I’d been carefully recording information about early modern printers’ names, printing locations, dates, and subject matter in different fields in my database, and was incensed to discover that the information had already been broken down in the library catalog, but “they” were hiding it from me!

  1. The four characters making up each year still need to be concatenated in Excel; this is just the straight “import” from tab-separated values.