Re: SFX MARCit records for Newsbank Early American Newspapers? Ercelawn, Ann 19 Feb 2009 20:27 UTC
Hi, We had this problem too. It's my understanding that you can opt for brief records with no attempt to match if there is no ISSN, or they will try to match based on title, and as you pointed out, we got a lot of false hits. We changed our profile to brief records if no ISSN, and at least don't get the wrong records now. Ann -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Kay Teel Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:10 PM To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: [SERIALST] SFX MARCit records for Newsbank Early American Newspapers? For a little over a year, we have been loading SFX's MARCit bibliographic records for our online resources in large packages/aggregations. For the moment, we are only loading MARCit records that contain an ISSN (CONSER records and MARCit brief records). We have noticed a distressing number of problems with records supplied by MARCit with links to newspapers, and the Newsbank Early American Newspapers packages in particular. What frequently happens is that MARCit supplies a CONSER record (with ISSN) for a completely unrelated serial that happens to have the same title proper -- a common situation with newspapers. Unsurprisingly, the early newspapers don't actually have ISSNs, so it appears that someone simply grabbed a CONSER record with an ISSN so they could give us a record to load. The SFX link goes to the right place -- the Newsbank Early American Newspaper page. Only the bibliographic record is wrong. For some titles, they have supplied us with multiple records for multiple unrelated serials with the same title (i.e., 2 wrong records linking to the same resource) and/or duplicate records for different early newspapers with the same title (i.e., 2 copies of 1 wrong record linking to 2 different resources). I know that bad data from MARCit is definitely not limited to the Newsbank titles, but we're concerned about the early newspapers in particular because of our faculty's needs. Has anyone else encountered these problems with the MARCit service? Have you had any success in getting cleaner data from them? Is the problem with Newsbank -- did they pinch a bunch of ISSNs from unrelated titles to give to their unISSN-ed newspapers? When we begin loading the MARCit records without ISSNs, is the problem solved because MARCit supplies correct CONSER records for the early newspapers? :) I'd love to believe this is so! (I don't have a lot of hope.) Or: does the problem become worse once the records without ISSNs are loaded, because the "match" is only made on title proper, and the universe of incorrect bibliographic records they can supply expands dramatically? That's my big worry, and I'd love some advice or cautionary tales if you have any. -- Kay Teel Serials and Arts Resources Metadata Development Unit Stanford University Libraries kteel@stanford.edu