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.

WorldCat Local, WorldCat Local Quick Start

I just attended a short web session on WorldCat Local Quick Start, because I wanted to find out more about it - I kind of doubt we'll ever be implementing it, and I don't really think we'd want to. It has some features that I think are pretty nifty (although there are other products that could do the same thing), like the ability for users to add their own reviews, create lists of items, save their searches for later, etc. One feature that I don't believe I've seen in other products is the inclusion of information about authors or others involved with the works - in the case of WorldCat Local, this draws on information from WorldCat Identities. I remember thinking that WorldCat Identities was pretty cool when I first found out about it, but I hadn't really thought of it being incorporated into a catalog like that - my brain just can't seem to make those kind of leaps.

As a cataloger, one thing I don't like at all is that all local record edits are meaningless in the WorldCat Local catalog. All WorldCat Local searches is WorldCat master records. True, these can be very good, but some of them aren't so good. I'm sure more of these records have been edited since the beginning of the Expert Community Experiment, but there are still many, many out there that are, well, shoddy, despite, in some cases, having quite a few library holdings attached. Just because a library has its holdings attached to a record doesn't mean that the cataloger(s) there edited the master record. Plus, even with the Expert Community Experiment, there are still records that need to be edited that can't be easily edited by the cataloging community. It drives me crazy when I come across a PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) record that needs to be edited and I can't edit it - and I don't have the time or inclination to write up the needed edits for OCLC or whoever and, if necessary, fax the proof.