Cataloging Errors in Download

I'm sure it is a standard requirement that we go through and perform heading maintenance after we download records.  I typically clean them up after each download, but it has taken me a while to get to the latest August download to clean up and merge the headings.  This is a task that usually takes me under an hour, but it just took me 3 hours to clean up the catalog.

The word "fiction" was spelled four or five different ways, with and without a period.  The word "adventure" was spelled wrong, as were 'detective' and 'juvenile".

There were multiple interpretations of "Contains sex, violence, and language" (alongside "Contains violence, language, and sex" and "contains Language, sex, and violence"--you get the idea) which needed to be figured out and separated for each title that might have all three.  Same for "Male and Female Narrators" for which there isn't a joint heading.  

There were strings of random numbers, like 004.  Does that mean an age?  A grade level?  No idea.  There were ages and grade levels mixed--for instance ages 3-7, which covers multiple categories in our catalog. There was even "Ages 3-6 excluding kindergarten".  That was a fun one to parse out.

I'm sure all the catalogs are slightly different, but it is a little frustrating to spend so much time on what seems like a common task and standard conventions like using a period or not, and spelling the word 'fiction' seems like a no brainer.

There were even headings that I've never seen before like "Linked Stories". 

Not sure where you guys get the files from, if you have cataloguers, or if NLS provides them, but definitely wanted to make it known that the latest downloads were a mess.

Thanks.

 

Thanks for letting us know!

The records come from NLS -- and we do a round of cleanup before they get to you to ensure that they load correctly.

We do expect everyone to still need to do some maintenance on their end (as you said, everyone's catalog is a little different), but hopefully August was an anomaly and things will be back on the quicker and easier side from here.

The headings entries you describe are charateristic of when older records or files are loaded and age reading levels are found in the 521 tags instead of the grade reading levels that are typically applied by NLS.

I went back and looked at the 5 files that were built for August - Completed, Marrakesh, NetworkBARD, NEW 0801, NEW 0815 - Attached is a listing of the tags as they appeared in those files and counts for how many entries. - I see some variations that I can bring up with NLS such as use of the older GSAFD forms vs the current LCGFT forms (ex. stories vs fiction). I also see variations of with punctuation vs without - this can be controlled for in the load - if you are getting headings duplicated based solely on punctuation, let us know and we can make adjustments. I also note that there is more variation on the wording used for the Contains and For Grades statements in the Marrakesh and Network files - I can mention this to NLS, but the 521 is a note field not a controlled heading field, so there does tend to be more variation in these records.

Regarding "newer" genres like Linked Stories,  Case Studies,  Sonnets, etc. -- NLS is using the LCGFT list for Genre headings ( www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCGFT/freelcgft.html ) -- there is a lot that is useful in those headings, and a fair amount that either isn't useful because it gets applied to everything or because it is so specific that it only appears a couple of times. I'm still trying to work through ways to allow for dealing with incoming headings and variations where libraries want to use the Broader Term or combine terms more efficently.

However, I still did not see any entries like the age range levels that you were describing in the August files - so we also went back and queried for titles modified in your database in August and noted that there were a large number of titles modified on 8/26. Looking back through the service tickets from those dates - there was a request to reload all of the DBC titles to prepare for duplication. I will acknowledge that the older DBC/Network records are considerably messier and that doing a cleaned up version of those records is a round to it that I have not had. 

I appreciate you looking into this. As i've cleaned up the headings, it's hard to say fully what they were, but I do the heading clean up after each and every download, so they haven't been there very long.

Among the interesting 'mistakes' were...
Fiction.
Fiction
Fction
Fiction]
004-008
3-7
Action & dventure

And so on. If you know how I could speak to at NLS I could try talking with them as well, as it doesn't seem like a KLAS issue, more a cataloging issue on their end. Just not sure who exactly to touch base with.

Thanks again!