Alex Johannesen wrote:
|determine relevance based on source,
Well, as you know, the 040 tag contains such information, but only in
the broad sense that the first library created the original record and
successive libraries "touched" the record and modified it in some
way--WITHOUT, of course, indicating exactly who's responsible for what.
However, as a *rough* guide, it might be good enough for *some*
selection purposes. You'd just have to have a blacklist and a whitelist
for libraries of various "persuasions", shall we say.
This is exactly how this tag was used in the early days of OCLC, by the
way. Some libraries became known for the less than stellar quality of
their cataloging and were informally "blacklisted" in terms of
succeeding libraries attaching onto, or trusting the quality of, those
bib records. Many U.S. libraries still use this tag in such a
qualitative manner by looking for "DLC" (Library of Congress) in the
initial position as a mark of trustworthy, high-quality data.
Harvey
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Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
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Received on Wed Feb 07 2007 - 18:15:48 EST