Newspaper Curation App

NCA on Github

Glossary

NDNP / Newspaper Catalogers

These are terms I’m trying to use properly, but which I sometimes still mess up. Don’t let that happen to you!

  • Title: A distinct newspaper title, such as The Daily Prophet. All titles will have a unique LCCN.
  • LCCN: Library of Congress Control Number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Control_Number. In terms of NCA (and ONI and chronam), this uniquely identifies a newspaper title.
  • Issue: A single published issue of a newspaper title, such as the April 20th edition of The Daily Prophet. Github users beware, it’s easy to hear “I need you to fix an issue” and stare blankly before realizing what was meant.

Made-up

Terms I’ve made up which may be important for developers and users:

  • Issue Key: This is a combination of an LCCN and optional date elements, used for finding / selecting a group of issues in bulk. This concept is used by tools such as the issue finder and the bulk upload queue tool. An issue key’s format is LCCN/YYYYMMDDEE:
    • LCCN is required
    • /YYYY is optional, but if present must be a four-digit year
    • MM is optional, but if present must be a two-digit month
    • DD is optional, but if present must be a two-digit day of the month
    • EE is optional, but if present must be a two-digit edition number
    • Each optional part must have all other optional pieces before it; e.g., you can’t specify LCCN/MM
  • MOC or MARC Org Code: Not made up by me, but the short form, “MOC”, may be seen a lot due to my laziness. This is supposed to be the MARC Organization Code designating the awardee of a batch of newspaper issues. However, in chronam and ONI, this determines the image attribution line, e.g., “Image provided by: Dallas Public Library; Dallas, OR”. This has lead to a necessary evil of misusing MOC in order to provide attribution. Currently ONI and chronam don’t provide a way to separate image attribution from the awardee. For anything that isn’t awarded by the Library of Congress, technically there is no awardee, but the software can’t actually accommodate a batch that doesn’t have this set to something.