Monday, May 4, 2015

The Portuguese Picket Dictionary

I wonder if anyone has ever searched for a Portuguese Pocket Dictionary in the MassCat catalog. If so, they would not have found it. Whoever entered the data for that particular resource did so incorrectly.

This is the sort of situation I face every Monday, Wednesday and Friday as I pour over the catalog looking for problems like typos, incomplete words, and bibliographic records too skimpy to know what the item really is.

My first priority is hunting for duplicate (and triplicate and quadruplicate) records. Sometimes it's hard enough to navigate the catalog without being confronted with two of the exact same thing and several more variations. Which is which?

I have a printout, in alphabetical order, of potential duplicate records. A few weeks ago I reached the letter E. On June 25, 2014, I posted that I had arrived at the letter D. It's going slowly, but I'm doing a lot of other thing, too.

Since Friday was May 1, I totaled my statistics for the month of April. While I don't have the exact figures in front of me, I merged over 800 bibliographic records. That's a pretty typical month. I also replaced several hundred incomplete records with ones with more detailed information. And several hundred additional records received what I call "minor edits" like correcting typos and adding page numbers when I can find them.

As I look at all the work that needs to be done to this catalog, I know I'll have a job for a very long time. At least now anyone looking for a Portuguese Pocket Dictionary will be able to find one.

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