Comparing Catalogs

Abstract

Evaluative and comparative studies of catalog data have tended to focus on methods that are labor intensive, demand expertise, and can examine only a limited number of records. This study explores an alternative approach to gathering and analyzing catalog data, focusing on the currency and consistency of controlled headings. The resulting data provide insight into libraries' use of changed headings and their success in maintaining currency and consistency, and the systems needed to support the current pace of heading changes. ********** Much of the work of technical services takes place out of public view. Perhaps this explains in part why measures of technical services' contribution to the library are relatively lacking in compendiums of library measures. The number of volumes and subscriptions in a collection, the rate at which electronic resources are accessed, circulations and reference interviews--all of these are frequently cited as measures of academic libraries' performance, but rarely is the work contributed directly by technical services used as a library's performance measure. For some in technical services, there might seem to be an advantage to being under the radar when internal or library-to-library comparisons are done; but the lack of measures can also leave any operation unsure of its own success and of the validity of any local or shared set of norms. Having practicable methods of determining a technical services unit's success in meeting its goals and of assessing that accomplishment in relation to that of peer institutions can help technical services units build confidence in their goals, identify systemic problems, and contribute to library planning and priority setting. The study presented here seeks to define and test an approach to measuring one of the contributions of technical services: the use of consistent and up-to-date headings in the library catalog. Methods of Measuring Catalog Data Quality One obvious component of library service is the product of technical services efforts: the data in the library catalog. The catalog assists users with finding known items in the collection; browsing the collection by subject, author, and title headings; browsing the result sets of keyword searches; examining and selecting items via their surrogate records; and locating the items desired. These basic services are provided through a wide variety of interfaces and displays. Vendors and designers of automated library systems offer a range of interface choices to their customers, and each library tailors its system's functionality and presentation for its users. Comparative evaluation of the differences between such varied interface options would inevitably be complex and highly subjective. In their review of the literature on quality in cataloging, Myall and Chambers note the difficulty and rarity of high-level evaluation of the catalog: Quality of the overall catalog appears to be less frequently the subject of study, ... notwithstanding the fact that both Cutter's objects and much of FRBR's approach are focused on the catalog as a whole rather than on individual records. Presumably, the limited extent of study at this level is due to the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the task, which now must include not only content and structure of the database, but also completeness and presentation of data on various screens, search engine execution, presence of context-sensitive help, and other elements in an environment in which users are familiar with many other Web-based information tools. (1) Nevertheless, behind the variable screens of automated system interfaces, the data records that feed catalog indexes and displays are highly standardized. The widespread adoption of a core set of data standards by the U.S. academic cataloging community--the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) 21 formats for mark up; the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed. …