More deduping, plus an explanation of why it is necessary

I did 6 or 7 more deduplication tests using MARCEdit, with no true success, but a little minor success. On the plus side, I can produce an overzealous list of duplicate records that includes true duplicates and a few that only look like duplicates (for example, same title, but one is a newer edition than the other). That at least gives us a list to work from, I suppose, although matching on ISBN would give a more accurate and probably more complete list.

In case you're wondering (I know this and my last post are somewhat technical), duplicate records are records that are basically for the exact same title - it was published by the same publisher, published on the same year, etc. When we get e-book record files from vendors, we sometimes get records for the same title from multiple vendors. Some of the vendors have records with OCLC numbers in them, some don't, and sometimes they might have OCLC numbers in them but not the same ones that another vendor used (yes, OCLC has duplicate records, lots and lots of them). When we load them, we end up with multiple records for basically the same thing. Ideally, we'd like to have an e-book that is available from multiple vendors accessible on one record.

That's where record deduplication comes in. Right now, we could do our deduping by searching each and every e-book title in the catalog and clearing up duplicates as we come across them. This is not a good idea - we have tens of thousands of e-books, and the number will only grow. The tests I've been doing are part of an attempt to automate deduplication, or at least come up with a list of potential duplicates so that we could avoid having to search every single title in our e-book collection.

I think I'm going to start reading articles on record deduplication. I probably should have done this earlier - if I find something right away that could help us, I'm going to kick myself.

Trying to dedupe records...and failing

While provider neutral e-book records are a nice idea, it's a little hard to do in practice when you're dealing with vendor e-book record packages. Today will be Round 3 of me trying to figure out how to dedupe our records without having to go through each title one by one.

In theory, deduplication could be done at the record loading stage, using, for instance, ISBNs as a second match point. In practice, this probably wouldn't go well, unless we decided to have print and electronic formats on one record - by matching on ISBN, we would end up matching our e-book records with our print records. There are probably other issues with this method that I haven't even thought of. I could do some testing, but I haven't really focused much on this method of record deduplication yet.

Instead, I've mostly been looking at methods of deduplication using MARCEdit. The obvious method, using MARCEdit's deduplication tool and trying to dedupe on ISBNs, has so far failed. I'm either using the tool wrong, or it's not working the way it should. The first day I started experimenting, I remember having some success by matching on main title information. I think I might try that again today. Unfortunately, that would result in multiple editions of one title being considered dupes. If it also lists actual dupes, it would still be better than nothing. Instead of having to search hundreds of titles, maybe we'd only have to search a few dozen. Or so I hope...