Steps for Normalizing Headings: 

1. Take the first 150 characters of the Heading (excluding MARC tag and indicators, but including subfields and delimiter characters);
2. Strip non-filing characters (taken from the 245, second indicator or the SKIP fixed-length field)
3. Strip apostrophes and diacritics;
4. Replace the ampersand character (&) with the word “and”;
5. Strip all special characters, except “+”, “#”, “$”, “%”, and “@”;
6. Replace subfield delimiters and punctuation with “null” characters (i.e., “space”);
7. Collapse multiple sequential “null” characters into single “null” characters;
8. Take the first 125 characters of the resulting string.