Hi Sarah, I agree with Kate that you may have to do a bit of extraction from the description field into new field(s) before you can begin removing duplicate entries. This data cleaning will help you to decide which duplicate (double) entry to get rid of. I have performed this type of work for 60 small museums over the past five years and it is somewhat tedious.
Contact me at richard at heritageinformation.ca if you would like to bounce ideas outside of the listserv. Richard Cloutier -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of sarah johnson Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 4:37 PM To: undisclosed-recipients: Subject: [MCN-L] database sorting questions I recently became involved with a project attempting to sort through a rather large (50,000 or so) collection of multimedia assets (videotapes, audiotapes, cds, dvds), looking for duplicate copies. I would like to at least get a start on this programmatically, using the database they were recorded in (the database has been exported to an excel file). However, I am having some trouble coming up with a method to query and sort the data. Each piece was logged separately, with no mention of whether it was actually a clone or viewing copy of a previously entered piece. For the most part, all of the information on the label was typed into a single 'description' field. Runtimes and dates are both in separate fields, as is title (although the separate title field was somewhat rarely used). Unfortunately, the labels did not always read exactly alike even if the videos were, nor did the layout of the entries always match. Runtimes are also often off by a few seconds. I really need a method of automatically pulling up all assets with about an 80% match between fields. Is there a way to do this? Or am I approaching this problem all wrong? Any help at all would be greatly, greatly appreciated! Sarah Johnson sarah at dvs.com _________________________________________________________________ See what you're getting into.before you go there http://newlivehotmail.com/?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_viral_preview_0507
