Ongoing re-cataloging

I'm currently engaged in a long-term re-cataloging project that began last summer and, with any luck, will be concluded this summer. We truly are bearing down on the last remaining affected records. Apparently some time in the mid 1980s, as our library building opened in 1986, there was a rush to move all the books from the old library to the present one. Evidently in the old library, not everything had made it into the online catalog yet and were still controlled by card catalog. In the rush to get everything moved over and into the online catalog, a stop-gap measure was employed, namely student volunteers were used to create "brief" records, just to hurry up and get the item into the OPAC quickly, and I supposed it was imagined they would go back and fix them after the fact. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, these records have remained unfixed until, you guessed it, I came along. Here is a brief example of what I am talking about. (please click on the image for a larger view)


The record on the right is a "brief" record, created by a nominally trained student, on the fly. The record on the right is the actual Library of Congress record that I ended up replacing it with. Look at the subject headings in particular. This would be Laugh-out-loud funny, except for the fact that the record on the right sat like that in our catalog for YEARS and YEARS until I replaced it with the DLC record just recently. I also ended up having to update our holdings in OCLC so that they now show up in WorldCat. In other words, unless you searched our OPAC directly, nobody in the world would know we owned this book by just checking WorldCat.

I've been working on this re-cataloging project since last summer, when it was spun out of an authority control project and became the main focus after we decided to outsource our authority work to a vendor, Backstage Library Works, who have done an admirable job. I've concluded my first manual sweep of the catalog searching by author last name. Most of the offending records had either a blank or 19uu in the fixed fields for date, which made them easier to spot and isolate from legitimate records. They also were distinct in that they had a mysterious 035 $9, which is a nonstandard subfield; these were products of a database migration, from the previous ILS to Voyager, but no 035 $a (i.e. OCLC number). We commissioned a special report from Backstage to find all the records thus affected (all records lacking 035 $a); Backstage found approximately 14,000 records matching this criteria, about 3% of all our records; However upon closer examination, many of these were "false positives", as the Backstage report also yanked in ALL materials on Reserve, ILL, and even Acquisitions brief records. In the reports I have reviewed so far, only about 15-20% of the records (if that many) are true hits. I am now manually sweeping through the Backstage special report, once again separating proverbial wheat from chaff. I would estimate that the actual record count remaining to be fixed is no more than 6,000 records. Many of them either lack a 1XX field altogether, or have a 110 or 111 field rather than a 100 field, and thus would never have turned up in a Personal Name search. I'm glad to be restoring full bibliographic access to these items and thereby enhancing the functionality of our catalog, and also making more of our holdings accessible to scholars through WorldCat and potentially ILL. No doubt some of the materials I'm handling ought to be weeded, and so, it could be argued, I may be wasting my time with some of them, but that's not my call to make; our weeding tasks are a separate process handled by acquisitions, so I don't worry about it very much. Sure, I sometimes feel silly re-cataloging, say, a Phys Ed book from the 1940s, but on the other hand, when I'm re-cataloging tomes of History (D's, E's and F's) or Art books (N's), Literature (P's) or Music (M's), I feel a sense of gratification in conducting this restoration work. As I've alluded to jokingly before, it's sort of a "faith-based" initiative; I have to proceed with the belief that restoring full bibliographic access to these items will be useful someday to someone somewhere, but never knowing if that will ever be true or not in actuality. So much of what Libraries do are "just in case", for the long term, versus the "just in time" mentality of the Web-centric world.

The nit I'm picking with the above record is simply that the Boxer Rebellion in China had nothing to do with the sport of Boxing; it was simply a slang Western description of the rebel Chinese faction, who emphasized athleticism and martial arts prowess. I'm sure the student who added that LCSH was only trying to help, but in so doing displayed her ignorance of history, and mislead multitudes of library patrons until this year. No longer, thanks to me.