Bib - Long Records
What is this?
MARC records have variable length -- they can be up to 99999 characters long (!), but are usually significantly shorter. The length of a MARC record is stored in positions 00-04 of the leader.
When is this trouble?
A record that is unexpectedly long (for example, by containing too many ISBNs) may result in a poor display in the online catalog. It may also cause indexing or export issues for this record, or for the entire collection.
A long record may actually be two or more records concatenated into one giant record and need to be split.
A long record may contain table of contents fields that are unhelpfully long and detailed, like a dictionary with a 505 entry for every term.
How to Find
If you are in Alma, there is an analysis to search for this issue in the "Looking for Trouble" folder. Go to the "Bibliographic" folder and look for the "Long Records" analysis. By default, this analysis is looking for records that are more than 20000 characters long, but you might want to change this for your own collection.
If you are in Voyager, you can run this SQL (BLOB) query:
SELECT BIB_ID, MID(RECORD_SEGMENT,1,5) FROM BIB_DATA WHERE SEQNUM='1' AND MID(RECORD_SEGMENT,1,5) > '20000';