The effective use of e-mail lists and other projects to improve bibliographic data quality

摘要

A user performs a keyword search. It fails. Why? Because the word was misspelled in the database. Somebody browsing the shelves of a library by Dewey class number doesn't find what they want because the work is misshelved, not because the shelver didn't pay attention, but because of a wrong number in the record. Someone looks for somebody by a personal name heading and they find not only works by the person they were looking for but also others with whom that person was confused because they share the same heading, or because a heading has actually been wrongly assigned. Or in another case, a new heading has been since created to which that person should have been moved. A scholar searching for works published in a bibliographic series finds some of the works in that series, concludes he’s found them all, but is wrong: there are others he didn't know about because no access to those other works is provided by a series heading.