The Letter D

For the last couple of years, I've been working at MassCat cleaning up the catalog. When I started, I was given a printout of probable duplicate records in alphabetical order by title. I look up each title and, if they are in fact duplicates, I merge them. After working 10 hours each week for the first year and 15 since then, today I reached the letter D. There are a lot of duplicates.

It's really not as bad as it seems. I have other duties in addition to merging duplicates. When a member library needs to add their holdings to a bib record but can't find one, they send the relevant information to me. I find a record and import it into the catalog. If I can't find a record, I create one. In the course of searching for records, I often find a duplicate (or two or three) and merge them on the spot. So there are lots of records beyond the letter D that have already been merged.

There are many reasons for all the duplicates. The entire catalog was run through a program that automatically merged duplicates, but the software (Koha) is extremely sensitive and only merged records that it was absolutely, positively, unquestionably sure were duplicates. Some records don't have ISBNs. Some have different ISBNs (which is often okay), and some just don't have enough information to work with.

Many MassCat members are school libraries. They are usually small and previously had a very simple automated catalog. These libraries never envisioned being part of a network. If they owned a title, all they cared about was that they owned the title. It didn't matter if the book was hardbound or a mass market paperback or who published it or when - they owned the title. That's fine for a single, standalone library. But once you're part of a network and loaning your items to other libraries, those things matter. Some people want only large print books; some (including me) don't like mass market paperbacks; sometimes it's important to have the latest edition or the title that's part of a specific series. Each of those must have it's own bibliographic record and the record needs to be detailed enough for the patron to determine what they'll be getting.

With the MassCat catalog, I think I have a job for life. I merge records when I determine they are exactly the same; I enhance records that have minimal information; I correct mistakes (sometimes accent marks do not import correctly and look more like swears than words). There are typos, too. There's lots of work to do, but I keep reminding myself that someday this will be the cleanest catalog anyone has ever seen.