Exactly. This is why we try to handle this stuff inhouse....these name headings can be so poorly constructed that we end up with mismatches from BSLW, and that means I have to deal manually with it anyway, so I may as well "head this off at the pass' and not send the records for authority control. Too many mismatches.

This is -not- the fault of BSLW. We save money (and frustration on my part) by not sending those records to BSLW as part of our quarterly workflow. It took awhile to totally tailor our profile the way we wanted, but now it's worth it.

We've been with BSLW for a year and a half, and I'm finally getting a reasonable handle on the quarterly workflow. It took me awhile to integrate what I could get from BSLW with what Voyager could give me, and to plan which reports to address first. If you're a Voyager library, you still need to check the global change queue :-) so it's like an additional 'report' that corresponds in some ways to the BSLW "Authority record change" report. The significant changes I -need- to deal with, I get from the Voyager global change report. All other changes (in fixed fields, added cross-references or note fields) are noted in the BSLW authority change reports, and I don't need those as much as the Voyager global change queue. So that eliminated quite a large number of BSLW reports from my consideration.

Western has one person dedicated to authority control 40 hours a week (me) and there's PLENTY to keep me busy. I'm not sure how other libraries without that many hours for authority control deal with the reports/quantity of work. If we did not reconcile those reports, our database would be suffering.

I can't impress how important it is to have someone or someones who can systematically go through these reports to find the work they need to do. Once you get through it a few times, it gets easier, but there is still plenty to keep me busy until the next quarter. I also do NACO work, generally I can get the most done at the end of one quarter and before we ship out the next quarter's records. This last time I used those couple of weeks to eliminate the old LC genre authority records manually and to re-code bib records with 650's that should be 655's. Our Voyager system is set to NOT overlay on $z in the 010 field. I also just finished work going through every gsafd heading and comparing against our catalog, adding the appropriate indicator and $2 gsafd. Where there were duplicates or conflicts between gsafd and lc genre, I took lc genre as the preferred heading.

Enough rambling...even on a Friday. Time to get back to the global change queue.

Judith Kirk
Coordinator, Authority Control
Western Michigan University Libraries
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5353
269-387-0688

From: "Exelby Alan Mr (LIB)" <A.Exelby@uea.ac.uk>
To: "Backstage Library Works Authority Contol Listserv" <bslwac@mailman.xmission.com>
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 7:07:16 AM
Subject: Re: [BSLWAC] Alexander Street, Chadwyk

Just a comment: I don’t think this is necessarily a question of the age of records – we have seen sets of ‘MARC’ records for e-books that were of appalling quality.

 

Alan

 

==============================
Mr A.V. Exelby,
Systems/Databases Librarian.
The Library,
University of East Anglia,
Norwich, NR4 7TJ

Tel.: 01603 592432
E-mail: a.exelby@uea.ac.uk

Information Services
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"Man, who'd have thought being a librarian could be so tough"
Seamus Harper, in 'Harper 2.0', "Andromeda".

(snipped)