Nicky,
If possible, we will try and edit the records individually to make sure they are up to scratch, although it can be a rather time-consuming effort. Increasingly, however, we are being forced to be more pragmatic about ebook collections, and some collections are so large that it is simply not possible to work through them. I take the view that it is more important to have something on the catalogue than nothing in that case. We have a couple of enormous packages where the records are rather less than ideal but at least they can be found, although they don't sound quite as bad as the ones you describe to be honest (we imported records without 008 dates from one source which had unfortunate effects as they appeared without fail at the beginning of a lot of searches, as the catalogue default was to sort by date). Another half-way house is to try and do as much automatic processing on large collections at the import stage as we can, although there are obviously limits as to what can be achieved with this.
We have manually catalogued a couple of packages running into the thousands but it depends on the state of the records and whether we have the capability to deal with them at the time, and it always takes time.
Cheers,
Tom
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Thomas Meehan
Head of Current Cataloguing
Library Services
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
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-----Original Message-----
From: Bibliographic standards in UK libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nicky Ransom
Sent: 10 November 2011 15:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: MARC Records from EBSCO
We subscribe to some EBSCO packages, one of which includes around 500 ebooks in amongst the journal titles. We have downloaded the free MARC records from EBSCO, but frankly, they are very disappointing in their quality - no dates, no authors, no subject terms, etc. I wonder what others do in this type of situation. Would you load the records into your catalogue regardless, on the basis that it will provide better access for the users? Would you upgrade the records first (although I am not sure that's an option with 500 records), or would you not take the records, leaving users to find the books through the EBSCO interface? I guess that this type of scenario will occur more and more for us, and I would be interested to hear others' approaches.
Nicky Ransom
Data Quality Manager and Cataloguer
University for the Creative Arts
Farnham, Surrey.
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