Sender: Rare book and manuscripts <EXLIBRIS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU>
OCLC is, regrettably, riddled with errors. One factor is the use of
poorly qualified employees to make the entries. Another is the
widespread custom of slavishly adopting previously entered
descriptions, rather than describing the copy at hand ab
ovo. Thus errors not only get scattered about but also etched in
stone. All of this is very difficult to remedy, although I think
they have made the attempt to pull up their socks in recent
years. And it is inevitable that the monumental task
of amalgamating OCLC and RLG (to which I subscribed with pleasure
for many years) will have been far from perfect, despite the best of
intentions. But all this said, it is our cow and we must milk it
if we will drink. There is, of course, KVK for continental books,
and the blessed ESTC for British and American books before 1801, and
sometimes the NUC (which, alas, I no longer have the space to house),
&c, &c. But for many purposes the OCLC remains the most convenient
source of information for most of us, to be used at best with
circumspection, and, at worst, with a jaundiced eye. Norman
At 03:37 AM 11/21/2007, you wrote:
I frequently encounter OCLC records without holdings. In several
cases I have tracked them down to libraries that used to report
through RLIN and I have just assumed that the holding information
would eventually appear when the RLIN migration was
complete. Perhaps I was naive.
But what really puzzles me is the situation revealed by C. J.
Scheiner's recent query regarding copies of Cavallucci's LEXICON
VOCUM. This comes up as another unlocated listing in FirstSearch
and WorldCat even though the book being described is at Harvard
(Houghton) and easily found in Hollis. Is this a fluke, or are
there many other records from Harvard (or other long-standing OCLC
libraries) which appear in their own online catalogues but are
absent from (or unlocated in) FirstSearch?
Jim Hinck
www.vialibri.net
At 11:29 PM 11/20/2007, you wrote:
Hello Will:
There are no holdings attached to that record in OCLC. Therefore, WorldCat
would not list a copy. It looks like Swarthmore entered the record, but they
deleted their holdings for some reason. I believe it's OCLC's policy not to
delete records even if all the holdings have been removed.
We here ran into the same situation.
So to clarify matters I called OCLC support.
They do not delete bib records even when there is no holding library.
They hope that someone will come around at some point and add a
holding eventually.
So your assessment is completely on point.
~Allison Rich
********************************
"Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend,
and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx"
Allison Rich
Catalogue Librarian
John Carter Brown Library
Providence, Rhode Island
Allison_Rich@brown.edu