Quoting Daniel CannCasciato <Daniel.CannCasciato_at_CWU.EDU>:
Inadequate catalog records have
> been around for a long time and have been updated locally for just
> as long. The ability to share these enhancements, capture them and
> pass them along in the form of upgraded records, has been around a
> fairly short while. It's a great piece of infrastructure support
> for a needed part of cooperative efforts. I imagine this must have
> some parallel in creation and maintenance of open source programs
> as well as collaborative intellectual efforts such as Wikipedia and
> the like.
There are some stats, possibly in the report on the market for MARC
records by R2 consulting (?), on how many record updates are NOT
returned to the shared cataloging environment. It's a very large
number. Some libraries report that they do not return records because
they assume that the changes they have made are only of local
interest. Many do not return records because there is a charge for
submitting updates to OCLC.
The first issue, that changes are only of local interest, is a
function of OCLC's "master record" method. If records from individual
libraries were available you could allow other libraries to be
notified when changes from "sister" libraries are available. To make
this clearer, in OCLC there is no way for, say, Ohio libraries to
exchange additions from other Ohio libraries, or for law or music
libraries to exchange modifications from their cohorts. In OCLC there
is only one record for everyone, so everything else becomes "local
interest." A more sophisticated sharing mechanism would mean that more
upgrades/additions get shared. (This is how RLIN did it, BTW.)
As for the latter, we need to come up with a method of sharing that is
not burdensome to the library that has made the effort to upgrade the
record. The "enhance" libraries do not get charged, but I believe they
must go in and upgrade the master record. My guess is that many other
libraries don't send in their upgrades, but some actual data on this
would be of interest.
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Sat Aug 07 2010 - 10:52:04 EDT