Re: Elitism - and Aristotle again! - in libraries (was "Elitism in libraries")

From: Simon Spero <ses_at_nyob>
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 13:36:54 -0400
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
On 8/6/07, Mark Ehlert <ehler043_at_umn.edu> wrote:

> MARC21 has this, sorta, but doesn't go far enough with it, in my
> opinion.  The first indicator in the 650 field, for instance,
> includes coding for ranking of subjects as primary and
> secondary.  Sadly, few of the other 6XX have this feature.


This indicator is very lightly used (SCM says it's not used by the Library
of Congress).

Running a count over just the  LCSH headings in seven million LC records,
this appears to be the case; there are only 811 coded values, and many of
these appear  wrong (e.g. primary not assigned to first subject, or
secondary assigned to same).

2007-08-06 13:26:53,478 INFO  [main] model.Count650Indicators - read 7000000
records, subject count = 8980268
2007-08-06 13:26:53,479 INFO  [main] model.Count650Indicators - 650  0 ...
occurs 8963089 times (99.81%)
2007-08-06 13:26:53,479 INFO  [main] model.Count650Indicators - 650 00 ...
occurs    16368 times (0.18%)
2007-08-06 13:26:53,479 INFO  [main] model.Count650Indicators - 650 10 ...
occurs        611 times (0.01%)
2007-08-06 13:26:53,479 INFO  [main] model.Count650Indicators - 650 20 ...
occurs        200 times (0.00%)

Simon
Received on Mon Aug 06 2007 - 11:36:38 EDT