Treatment of special signs

[wagneral]

Treatment of special signs in title and signature has to be re-evaluatedand corrected. For example there are problems if the signature contains slashes "/"

[th122]

Lots of problems with characters that would need speacial treatment and elaborate escape mechanisms when used for filenames.

Just to list a few notable problem chars:

• Already mentioned: / is a problem, because it's a path separator in unix.
• Actually, everything beyond 7-bit-ascii gets blown up to its html representation. Used as part of a filename this doesn't look particularly nice. See both examples below for illustration.
• Depending on local configuration, sublibraries or their circulation desks might have excessively long names, blowing up the filename to unwieldy proportions. At least in our case, the naming of sublibraries and their circulation desks was not done with the restrictions of pathnames in mind, see No. 2 below for a particularly cumbersome example.

Examples of filenames that have been particularly ugly or failed for obvious reasons:

1. Rückgabebeleg__ZB011__GZ_Foyer/Rückgabe__HU000196155____incoming__2017-01-17_13-40-22__587e1ec6be4b0.html
2. Transfer__ZwB_Germanistik/Skandinavistik_-_GE105_Ausleihe/Rückgabe__ZwB_Fremdsprachl._Philologien_/_TB_ZI_Großbritannien-Zentrum_-_FR131_Ausleihe/Rückgabe__DE-11-001389576____incoming__2017-01-20_15-57-43__5882337730ffd.html

So our solution to this was to add a bunch of replacement rules to the filtering script to catch the worst of these offenders. These rules are quite specific to our configuration, since they have the added task of shortening the lengthy descriptions as well.

We've already switched to using barcodes instead of signatures, since these have proved too much of a headache to escape around - some examples from the call_number fields of recent resource requests:

• Zp 6657:2:'10':F8
• 5/2265 - 3,1'a'.2'a'
• SA/EU 422 B466 B623 B4(3)
• GB 3024 B432(3)+2
• SOA/EF 34112 Å165 Å466(.003) ( Å expands to Å, the call_number field however displays it as shown in this example)

Tatjana Heuser (Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)