Re: Book Company Problems

[Betty Dawn Hamilton <bhamilt@TENET.EDU>]

On Tue, 31 Oct 1995, Cathy Rae wrote:

> that is on the disks I receive.  Could it be that these companies are not
> able to hire people with enough knowledge to do the job correctly?  Also,
> some records come from cataloging companies, not the book publisher.

Cathy and Group,

A number of years ago an administrator in my district helped us to obtain
a grant to create a union catalog. He appointed himself as the contact
person so a *librarian* was not in charge. To save money, 8 data entry
people were hired (ladies) to key in data. There were no librarians
around daily because the data entry was done during the summer and
holidays (mostly). (Our "contact" person supervised them.)

The jobber was just getting into the automation business, so they
recommended Precision One. What wasn't there (and much of ours was not
because it was old and we had not had time to weed ... another long
story).  HOWEVER, the jobber was *building* its data base with people who
were their "beta" testers. That meant that as each school who automated
with their system and did their own retrospective conversion, the material
was added to the master database -- or that's the story I was told. In our
case, sad to say, because this "contact" person did not realize the
seriousness of having people key in data who knew nothing of cataloging
(or even libraries in some cases) the records were/are very inconsistent
and often not *true* cataloging. That jobber's data base may be filled
with entries keyed in by data entry people like ours from schools all over
the nation.

We are still straightening our records after 8 years because when we
automated, the data were extracted from the CD union catalog and converted
to our current system.  (Not *MY* choice, you can be sure!) (Our current
automation support people had a TERRIBLE time straightening all of those
records out because of so many inconsistencies -- but they did a good job,
considering what they had to work with.)

Your records may have been keyed in that way and sold to other companies
since such data are sold from time to time (like lists of names). If
anyone who works for a cataloging company or publisher who has cataloging
done is online monitoring our discussion, I would be interested in their
comments as well.

Betty
bhamilt@tenet.edu