Bib - Place Code
What is this?
Bibliographic records have a fixed field (008/15-17) which indicates the state or country of publication, production, etc. of the work being cataloged using a code made up of three lowercase characters (from the MARC Code List for Countries. In OCLC, this fixed field is called Ctry. When you search a catalog by language (or limit your search results to a particular language) this is the field that is used.
When is this trouble?
If this fixed field is not set, or is not set to a valid code, the resource will not be included in searches that are limited by location of publication. It may show up in facets and displays as "Unknown" or similar.
A place code that is set incorrectly but is very close to a real
language code (like _fr instead of fre) may be
an indicator that all of the fixed fields are shifted/corrupted, which
would also affect other searches and limits.
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 "Place Code" analysis. This analysis searches for all language code field fields not matching a code from the MARC Code List for Countries.
If you can run reports of fixed fields or language codes, you may find
many errors by searching for a language code that does not match the pattern
of being three lowercase letters or three lowercase letters followed by a space (regular expression
/^[a-z][a-z][a-z ]$/).