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Usage of the 856 MARC Field: A Sample

This is an archive of a long-past project to analyze the usage of 856 fields extracted from a sample of 1,000,000 MARC records from UC Berkeley. The purpose of this analysis was to try to determine whether it would be possible to algorithmically detect when a link points to the full content of an item rather than the table of contents or some other portion of the item. A paper resulting from this analysis is Trouble in Online Paradise: An Analysis of MARC 856 Usage at One Institution.

See also an excellent analysis by Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Brian Lavoie, and Ed O'Neill, "Mining for Digital Resources: Identifying and Characterizing Digital Materials in WorldCat" that offers a more sophisticated and thorough analysis of options for determining online full-text availability based on existing MARC data.

[ All 856s [19,594] | With $3 subfield [10,234] | With $z subfield [7,341] ]

LC Documentation - LC Guidelines - OCLC Documentation and Definition of Second Indicator (MARBI)