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A week or two ago I posted a question about the Marc records of Winnibago. In particular, I'm interested in their accuracy and consistency. The following are the replies I got. If you would care to add to the information, that would be great. I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who also have the automated catalog, since that's where the inconsistencies can cause problems. I'm also looking for full records, not just what I have on my shelf list card. I want people to be able to do key word searches to find things, and if notes and subject headings are missing, the records won't be very useful. -- Kathy Lafferty klaffert@pen.k12.va.us Patrick Henry Elementary School Alexandria, VA Hi - We had winnie doe our retro about 3 years ago. We sent about 10,000 records and received 8500 hits (we had specified hits only). In any retro you have to accept the fact that the company matches your title to their database, but that database has records that have been created over a long period of time with no particular uniform high standard for all. Winnie does not massage the records to be complete - if they did that, the cost would be much higher. Also, they will for an added fee, create new records from your shelflists, but even there the quality will be based on the quality of your shelflist info. With that in mind, we were generally pleased with what we got. As we come across things that we feel need editing, we have done so, but the records were quite usable. What did we do with the 1500 we did not get? We matched them against Brodart's Precision One (also of varying quality) and got about an 80% hit rate. No product will be perfect. I do recommend that all who will be working with any automated program learn the basics of MARC records, because they will have to be able to edit and add no matter who does the conversion. I have heard from a friend of mine that Winnebago will not confirm in writing that they use full MARC records. >retrospective conversion. Cavaet Emptor: I am both a librarian and (by night) doing retro conversion and selling library automation software (see http://www.link.ca/~lex/). I will not talk of my biases, however. I would advise you to sample the retro conversion capabilities of different firms, and get prices at the same time. There is a wide difference in quality (I used to work for an OCLC affiliate, and know this to be the case). Choose 50-100 records at random (every 2" in shelflist, etc.), selecting some of each type of media. If the card has one word on it, send it in anyway. Ask them to send you the "hits" they get, and send you "TYPICAL SAMPLES OF THEIR CATLOGING OF NOHITS"). Consider the results of this sampling process as well as the price. When you accept a bid, make a proviso: tell them you will sample the records in each batch and want the priviledge of sending the whole batch back if the results aren't on a par with the sample work. Hi Kathryn - This is my first time responding to a message on LM_Net but I felt compelled to do so, as we had Winnebago do our retrospective conv. and were very pleased - had almost no problems to speak of. They are very good to deal with customer-service-wise, as you may already know. Most of the libraries in our county have used Winnebago and have found them to be very reliable. I have found Winnebago much better than some of the records I have received with new materials. I have used Winnebago for some retrospective, and for some cataloging of new materials. I strongly recommend that you contact RLA (Retrolink Associates), a part of Ameritech Library Services. They can be contacted at (800) 765-6508. They do the best work I'm aware of anywhere. Recon isn't something you want to have to do over again or have to go back and repair later. Recon is an area where I wouldn't cut any corners. If you do, the low quality will haunt you for years. Do it right the first time. You'll be glad you did.