Provide MARC record quality measures to CZ collections
CZ collections vary in regard to the quality of their metadata. Some CZ collections contain rich MARC records, while others contain very poor records. When facing the question whether to import vendor's MARC records or to rely on CZ records, librarians usually lack basic information about the quality of existing MARC records in a given CZ collection.
I would like to suggest that each CZ collection will include basic statistical information about the MARC records quality. Such information could be generated in different ways.
One possibility is to provide an analysis based on predefined quality profiles of MARC records. Here, specific profiles of MARC record quality would be defined (such as: 'brief', 'basic' and 'rich'), this in accordance to the type and number of MARC tags included in each profile. Based on those predefined quality profiles, each collection would then include a summary of the percentage of records fitting each quality profile. The librarians could see that CZ collection 'X' contains 10% 'brief' MARC records, 60% 'basic' MARC records, etc.
Second possibility (complementary to the previous), would be to provide a general MARC tags count for all the collection records. Here, librarians would easily see the frequency of each MARC tag in the records set. With this information provided, it would be easier for librarians to assess the MARC records quality of a collection, judging by the percentage of records that contain certain tags, as ISBN (020), ISSN (022), subject heading (6xx), etc. Preferably, within the CZ collection view, librarians would be provided with a summary of the information, focused on several important tags (ISBN/ISSN, authors, subject heading, etc.), and an option to download a full frequency analysis report.
Hagay
shared this idea
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Nathan Rupp
commented
It would be helpful to have this information available in Alma to let technical services staff know whether or not they should spend the time activating the portfolios from the community zone or move right away to obtaining MARC records from the vendor or another provider and importing them into Alma. More importantly, I would like to see higher quality MARC records provided in the community zone.