Presenting LHOP data
Staff at several libraries in our region have ordered Local Holdings Offline Products, and we've asked elsewhere what they plan to do with this data. Here's another piece of the picture:
How do we present the LHOP file data?
The OCLC Quick Reference Guide to the LHOP includes a brief description about how to convert the tab-delimited LHOP file into an Excel spreadsheet. But it doesn't seem to me that the spreadsheet is a very convenient form to read the holdings information; title info is in column B, while holdings data is in column H or O, or even R and beyond.
Library staff get to decide which of these fields are useful and how to present them. Which fields do you actually want to include in any file or printout you'll use? Is the tab-delimited file useful as it is, or do you need to edit it before you can actually use it?
With some help from our MINITEX IT crew, we are looking at the possibility of creating a way to manipulate the file into some pre-set forms, more like the old printouts we used to get from OCLC. Of course, this raises another set of questions:
- If it were possible to turn the LHOP file into a simpler form of holdings (for example, leaving out some of the coded data) would you want to do that?
- If you could pick the parts of the LHOP record that you wanted to see in a modified product, what fields would be useful to you? There could be different elements for different purposes; please indicate what you'd want to do with the modified file.
We hope you'll join in on this thread to share your ideas. We'll see what MINITEX can do to help you make these files work for you and your library, and to share our experiences with each other.
And hey, if you're ahead of us and have already modified your LHOP file, let us know what you did. Maybe you'll be a pioneer, blazing trails for the rest of us!