[Web4lib] MARC strictness

[Lars Aronsson]

Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt wrote:

> Part of what you are asking about has to do with the different 
> speeds or cycles and different levels of cataloguing quality 
> tolerance that exist from one type of library to another and one 
> size of library to another.  Sometimes a very large university 
> library will have to bear with inconsistencies for a year or 
> more because its budget for re-cataloguing is spread out over a 
> year or a 5 year plan.  The inconsistencies can come from legacy 
> collections, change of staff, re-organisations...

One of the strangest inconsistencies that I've found was this:

    600 14 $a Chateaubriand, Fran $d ois René de

What surprised me even more, however, was the response I got when 
I reported this.  The librarian told me that this comes from a 
batch conversion of some legacy records a few years ago, where the 
c-cedilla (ç) character was misinterpreted as the subfield 
separator followed by letter d, i.e. subfield "$d".  He informed 
me that he had now corrected the record that I reported.  But 
wait, there are hundreds of similar records!  It's as if he just 
didn't have the tools to do a global "search and replace".

This is when I thought that, hey, I have those tools.  I could 
find and fix the majority of these records in a matter of hours 
and maybe earn myself a few hundred dollars.  That is not a full 
library budget, but the salary cost for one workday. The current 
state is an official embarrassment.  It would be good to fix this.  
If it is common that library catalogs have these inconsistencies, 
and library systems don't help to fix them, I could make it a 
business to offer my MARC tune-up services.

But again, this inconsistency really doesn't matter because you 
can still search for Chateaubriand.  Who cares about the given 
name? If libraries thought that inconsistencies were important, 
they would have found ways to fix them long ago.  Add to this that 
libraries are monopolies.  They have to fight against budget cuts, 
but never against competitors.  The library with the erroneous 
catalog records doesn't really lose business.  If they don't 
directly benefit from fixing them, then why should they?

So, back to my question: How can you motivate that libraries 
should fix their broken catalog records?  Or shouldn't they?



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se