A system change will typically include information about specific processes within our system. The changes may or may not always affect your actual delivered results, but we want to keep you abreast of our changes just in case they do affect your results. One thing to note is that sometimes these explanations might be a little technical in nature (and somewhat wordy).
 
A lot of times when we send out updates or include information in our profiles, wiki, or planning guides, we use the dollar sign '$' to refer to a subfield marker. But in this case, the $ refers to a portion of a string we are matching.
 
http://ac.bslw.com/community/wiki/index.php/RDA_4.7
 
Our RDA 4.7 profile option spells out certain, specific abbreviations to their fuller form in the 500 and 504 fields. As part of that update process, we use positional variables in our programming to account for terms we are searching for (to replace) as well as terms that we want to retain.
 
So we might have a search string like so:
vol. [0-9]+
 
The positional variables for that are:
$1 - vol.
$2 - [0-9]+
 
When we make the update to spell out 'vol.' to 'volume', we are doing so to the $1 positional variable. But then we want to also retain the information after that change. This is represented by the $2 positional variable. If the $2 string represented '99', for example, then the resulting (updated) heading would look like this:
volume 99
 
System Change
The change we made is that, sometimes, we had carryover $2 positional variables that did not need to be there. And they ended up as a literal '$2' being added after an abbreviation that we had just spelled out.
 
An example:
500 |a Includes introd.
 
Would be spelled out to:
500 |a Includes introduction$2.
 
By our estimates, about 30% of our clients have selected to include RDA 4.7 in their processing. This issue may have found its way into your spelled out abbreviations in the 500 or 504 fields.
 
We would be happy to help clean these up for you if you've identified these in your processed records.

Nate Cothran, PMP | Vice President, Automation Services
Backstage Library works | Provo, Utah & Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
801-342-5697 | nate@bslw.com | ac.bslw.com/mars | How am I doing?