Cataloging Errors in Download

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.