A Unit of the University System of GeorgiaA Unit of the University System of Georgia

Bibliographic database integrity in a consortial environment

Evergreen International ConferenceMay 21, 2009

• Elaine Hardy• PINES Bibliographic Projects and Metadata Manager

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: illustration of single record for each serial

volume

GPLS Intern’s statistics

Before AfterAlexander McCall Smith 245 172Grace Livingston Hill 1119 549Mary Higgins Clark 771 386Magic School Bus (print) 554 218Danielle Steel 1235 718

Duplicate records cause – “User information overload”– “Reduced system efficiency”– “Low cataloging productivity”– “Increased cost for database maintenance”

Sitas and Kapidakis, 2008

“There is no question that merging such records is vital to effective user services in a cooperative environment.”

Tennant, 2002

What patrons think ---• wish that you would list the most current book first and have only

one entry for each book instead of showing multiple entries. Sometimes I have to look through 50 - 100 entries to see 20 books and the newest book by the author is entry 80. There should be a way to stream line this procedure.

• Consolidate entries for the same title. There are numerous entries on some titles beyond the breakdown of hard cover, PB, large print,audio, etc.”

• Why so many listings for the same books--that's confusing• When I look up a book, many times I get two pages all of the same

title with the same cover. It confuses me because I see that my library system doesn't have it, but if I scroll down...Whoops! We do have it. What is that all about? It sucks.

• Creating a standard for the way an items information is entered. Some books only have half the title entered and this can create problems when searching for specific materials

Why?

• Big library does not equal good data• A large library does not always follow rules and adhere

to standards• Size can they cut corners for “efficiency”• Local notes don’t belong in subject fields• Make the time to check your data• Publishers are not catalogers’ friends

Examples of problem reference library records

.http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_2423PH3090.html

.

Legacy system characteristics• All were IBM based systems• No tags, thus no definition of fields• All fields fixed length

– allotted so many characters for each field• No standards

– Not required to enter pagination or publisher• Extraction of data a problem

– had to count in to find beginning of next field– In many cases, had to supply a pub date. One lib has 1901 as a

pub date on most of their extracted records 

Records from a nonMARC system

Phase II

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Potd/2007-01

Records with corrupted headings

Lessons learned• Big library does not equal good data• Make the time to check your data• Publishers are not catalogers’ friends• Be careful about CIPs with no description and records with multiple ISBNs• Come up with realistic match when records are same but information differs• One library will not have the same good records across all their collections

– may have good print but bad AV• LOTS of programming if multiple sources of records.• No matter -- budget, personnel, time -- is as important as concentrating on

clean-up prior to migration• Be as specific as possible with vendors, test and have a penalty phase.• Have the right people in place from day one

Enable discovery

Goodbye