Fiscal Year 2008 Recap of OCLC Quality Control and CIP Upgrading Activities
Over the next few days, I want to go back and post on some things that occurred just as I was contemplating or launching this blog. On July 9, Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, reported to OCLC-CAT [permission to quote]
For the fiscal year just concluded (July 2007 through June 2008), OCLC staff have:
- corrected 2,137,903 bibliographic records
- performed 207,742 merges resulting in the deletion of 317,022 bibliographic records
- added 165 new authority records
- updated 395,817 authority records
- referred 765 authority records (name and subject) to the Library of Congress for resolution
Many of the changes resulted from the processing of 182,348 change requests, an increase of 21% over the same period of fiscal year 2007.
During the same time period, OCLC CIP Upgrade Unit staff have:
- upgraded 20,501 CIP records
- added 1,006 new authority records
- updated 857 authority records
These figures for authority records include 450 new series authority records and updates to 247 existing series authority records. This activity with series authorities continues to grow as a result of OCLC’s adapting to the Library of Congress’s stopping series authority work.
I’m interested in the increase in change requests and wondering if it has to do with the increased use of Worldcat as a front end. I know that as my institution taught more students to access our holdings through Worldcat for various reasons, I sent in more change requests for corrections I couldn’t make myself, particularly if they affected access.
