GEN: Checking Commercial Cataloging

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

On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Janice Force (Lansing) wrote:

> ahead for the next 5 years and I check each disk first before importing.

Janice and Group,

Since many of us are new to this automation business, I would like to
emphasize what you just said here. We have had our system up only little
over a year and I'm still entering data as I have time on some of the
older books that were not included in the retrospective conversion.

I learned as you did, by experience, to check ALL records of new books.
We have received several diskesttes done by commercial catalog companies.
The first one I received I excitedly uploaded directly into our
database.  When I later looked at some of the records, I realized that
their information was not as complete as I like. It's still there, but
"when I have time" (you know how that is!), I'm going to delete all of
those records and redo them. (Fortunately, it was one of my smaller
orders, so it affects only about 40 books or so.)

Just last week when our most recent order arrived, I printed out the
additions list before posting to our database. While I didn't find any
really big ERRORS, I *did* find some changes that I needed to make to
make the new books more easily found in *my* library.  (Example, we still
have a 92 section and a 920 for collective biographies -- something I
will deal with "when I have time".)  One or two of the new records for
single biographies had 920 on them, so I changed the numbers to 92. Now,
those were not a big deal, but by checking the records *before* posting,
I was able to adjust as necessary for THIS particular collection.

Needless to say, now I *never* post without checking a printout first.
When people are just getting into automation, they may not realize the
importance of that.

Betty
bhamilt@tenet.edu