Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Expert Community Experiment activity

From an email sent by Glenn E. Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, on 7/14/09:
"In June, activity was higher with 19,387 replaces compared to 16,704 in May. That brings us to a total of 79,406 Expert Community replaces since the Experiment started in February. The number of Expert Community replaces continues to be higher than any other type of replace.

1,011 institutions did at least one replace during the month of June
with 16 institutions doing more than 200 replaces. 1573 institutions have
done at least 1 replace during the span of the Experiment with 449 having activity each month.

Intensive review of replaced records for the month of May has been completed and the June review has started. As we announced at the beginning of the Experiment, it will last at least until August 15th. As we make more progress with the review process, we will have more information about future plans.

Here are statistics for other types of replaces during June:

Database Enrichment: 16, 992 (up from 15,950)
Minimal-Level Upgrade: 14,185 (up from 13,178)
Enhance Regular: 15,212 (down from 15,521)
Enhance National: 3400 (up from 2,998)
CONSER Authentication: 1,490 (up from 1,118)
CONSER Maintenance: 5,785 (up from 5,410)"

It's tough to tell, because the stats I can see online for the number of record replaces I've done don't say how many of the replaces fall under the Expert Community Experiment, but it's possible that the Dick Smith Library is one of the 16 institutions that did more than 200 replaces last month. I looked up my numbers, and I did 202 record replaces - if those all count under the Expert Community Experiment, then Dick Smith Library is one of those 16 institutions. Yay! There's no actual reward for this, other than knowing I made some of the master records in WorldCat a little better just by doing the work I normally do, but it's still kind of cool. We're not an Enhance library, and I don't think we'll ever be, so I hope that the Expert Community Experiment will become a permanent thing - I like being able to fix glaring errors and/or omissions in WorldCat master records. If this experiment doesn't become a permanent thing, I'll just have to go back to not fixing master records - it takes too much effort to figure out what sorts of changes I can and can't do, and I don't have the time to send out error reports (with, in some cases, faxed proof) for everything I can't fix myself.

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Melissa, I wanted to be sure that you know that there are reports available to you that do break down replace activity (and other activity as well) in more specific ways.

    The report you want is available to you on OCLC’s Product Services Web (http://psw.oclc.org). Here are instructions for retrieve it:

    - On the Product Services Web home page, click on “download records and reports”
    - In the “Reports and Statistics” list, click on “OCLC Product Code Detail Usage Report” (about two-thirds of the way down the list)
    - At the prompt to log on, enter the authorization and password that you use to access Connexion
    - You can either view the report on your screen or download it as a text file
    - Expert Community Experiment replaces are identified by Product Code ONT6390 in the “non-billable” portion of the list. Other replaces are also on the report.

    Let me know if you have questions.

    Glenn E. Patton
    Director, WorldCat Quality Management
    OCLC
    6565 Kilgour Place
    Dublin OH 43017-3395
    Phone: +1.800.828.5878, ext. 6371 or +1.614.764.6371
    Fax: +1.614.718.7187
    Email: pattong@oclc.org

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  2. Thanks for the info! I took a look at our information - sadly, the broken down information confirms that we are not one of the 16 institutions (which actually makes more sense than if we were - I can't imagine that I could single-handedly manage to do something that only 15 other institutions managed to do). Actually, for June it looks like we had no Expert Community replaces - May was better. Ah well, my bubble is burst, but I'll try to work harder. :)

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