The responses have died down to my question about the pros and cons of
doing an Alliance Recon after migrating from Spectrum to Destiny. I
think my district has decided to hold off and do as much cleaning up of
our post-switch records as we can this year and then revisit the idea
when inventory time rolls around next May. Thanks to everyone who
responded! I've included some of my reply posts where they help make
sense of someone else's response.
"We moved to Destiny almost 3 years ago. What a shock when we started
looking at our records!! We actually had to restrict the majority of
librarians from doing cataloging because all they were doing was the
title (and often misspelled!). We were told by Follett that when we
went to Destiny, all similar records would be merged into a single
record in Destiny. Didn't happen. But not because of Follett--because
of poor cataloging. Destiny MUST see a matching ISBN, author, and
title. Then it looks at copyright and publisher. Then it looks to see
which record has the most searchable fields which is then considered the
best record and merges the others into the best one. HOWEVER, if the
author's birthdate is missing, if one word is misspelled, it won't
merge. (Just to show you the problem, Ann Martin's books had more than
970 records which took me five days to clean up. What a mess!! Often
the titles were just BSC 17, and several had different birthdates for
her. GRRR.)
I see no reason why all of your schools shouldn't do a recon NOW
before Destiny which would give you a better chance of mergeable
records. I would do it, and then also look for brief records to see if
you can find a better record.
If you are thinking of doing a recon AFTER you move to Destiny, that
may be MORE of a problem. Let's say you have 10 different records for
one book. You do a recon on them. Maybe five will match and five won't
for the reasons listed above. You will have five untouched records and
five identical records from Alliance. You will still have ten
records."
--- Becky Henderson <HendersonB@usd231.com> wrote:
> Thanks, .... It sounds like we did everything you suggested but I
> don't think our district paid to have our MARC records cleaned up.
I
> was the librarian rep on the team that worked on the conversion and
I
> remember very carefully filling out the questionnaire. It's not a
> question of duplicate records so much as records that are for the
same
> book but which vary slightly from school to school. Thanks for the
> feedback and so far, so good on the conversion!
>
> Becky
"Now I understand what you mean. We have the same problem, and are
waiting till the fall to clean it up. Destiny has a function that lets
you merge similar records--the example our Media Director uses is 4 or 5
different MARC records for Lord of the Flies(with 30 or 40 copies
attached!)--different editions, hardback and paperback, different
publishers, but the same book. We are on the verge of deciding that we
might keep two records--one paperback and one hardcover, and merge
different editions onto those two records. A question for you--how are
you handling original cataloging? Are all district media people given
authority to do original cataloging, or are you limiting it to one or
two...And do you do central processing, or does each school handle their
own? We're considering having two people do original cataloging, and
allowing individual media people to add copies to records that already
exist, or to add records supplied by vendors or avaialble on Alliance
Plus, LOC, or OCLC."
---- Becky Henderson <hendersonb@usd231.com> wrote:
> I've been able to use the merge duplicates function to clean up the
few things
> I've stumbled across and I'm beginning to think that might be the way
to
> go rather than attempting the full recon. I DO want to be able to
> differentiate between a hardcover and a listening kit and I'm afraid
the
> recon might merge those records. As for cataloging, we don't have
any
> central processing. We mostly do copy cataloging and very little
> original cataloging. In fact, I tend to do a lot of it and then
everyone
> else can borrow my records, which should be even easier to do with
Destiny.
> But it's definitely stuff to think about!
"I haven't done a whole lot with the MARC records merge function on
Destiny, but as I understand it, you choose the MARC record you want to
keep, and it simply links the copy records to that MARC record--it
doesn't change or delete anything except the duplicate MARC.
One way my district differentiates between the various kinds of
books is by call number prefixes...PB for paperback, etc. And we also
use the entire author's last name on hardcover fiction rather than the
first three letters. And of course we call them Kits, or Classroom Sets
(CS).
That's what I like about being a librarian--I can pretty much do what
I want with my collection within the broad parameters of the DDCS.
Good luck with Destiny."
"RECON work is labor intensive. What you have discovered is usually
the
norm. I converted Anchorage School District's individual school sites
into a real digital centralized library index in the 80s and we now
have
1.3 million items. About 5000 titles remain to be updated properly to
meet standards."
Becky Henderson, MLS
Gardner Elementary School LMC
218 E. Shawnee
Gardner, KS 66030
hendersonb@usd231.com
(913)856-3341
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