Abstract
OCLC's Online Union Catalog (OLUC) contains bibliographic records created under various cataloging guidelines. Until December 1980, no system-wide attempt had been made to resolve record conflicts caused by use of the different guidelines. The introduction of the new guidelines, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2), exacerbated these record conflicts. To reduce library costs, which might increase dramatically as users attempted to resolve those conflicts, OCLC converted name headings and uniform titles in its database to AACR2 form.The purpose of the conversion was to resolve record conflicts that resulted from rule changes and to conform to LC preferred forms of heading if possible.
Highlights
In May 1978, upon receiving an advance copy of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules Second Edition (AACR2), OCLC formed an internal task force of librarians who were professional catalogers to study the new rules
The AACR2 Task Force was charged with identifying differences between AACR2 and AACRl as applied by the Library of.Congress
The task force compared the two sets of rules on a rule-by-rule basis to determine: (1) effects of rule changes on the MARC record formats, (2) who benefited from the changes, and (3) relative costs of the changes on both a one-time and a continuing basis
Summary
In May 1978, upon receiving an advance copy of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules Second Edition (AACR2), OCLC formed an internal task force of librarians who were professional catalogers to study the new rules. In light of estimated costs to individual libraries to convert existing headings and uniform titles to AACR2 form, the task force studied the requirements for an OCLC machine conversion. The task force assigned the rule changes to pattern sets. Pattern sets were defined as combinations of character strings, punctuation, subfield coding, and other characteristics that indicate that the heading could be algorithmically changed to conform to the new rules. Before making a commitment to convert all 100 of these pattern sets, tests were run to determine the approximate number of bibliographic records that would be changed. The task force's study, in general, showed that OCLC could convert by machine a large portion of its bibliographic records to conform to AACR2
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