On 2012-08-20 22:38, Roy Tennant wrote:
> Any errors in WorldCat can be reported to [log in to unmask] We take
> record quality seriously, but as you can imagine when you take in
> records from thousands of sources around the world, this is a constant
> struggle. We have our own quality control efforts, but individuals
> reporting problems are also an important strategy.

The web page for a bibliographic record, when I look at it,
in the top-left menu, has a "report feedback" option, but
the form that pops up doesn't indicate whether the
referring page URL will be included in the report.
It should be, of course.

What I have done is just to search (worldcat.org and
hathitrust.org) for some common Swedish words, and
I don't have to do this for long before some very
obvious (to a native speaker) spelling mistakes appear.
One example is this,
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/681652093
This record has a link to Hathi Trust, where the display
of the title page immediatly shows that the A-ring is
on the wrong A.

If both Hathi Trust and Google receive catalog records
from partner libraries, the error must originate from
Columbia University where this book was scanned by Google
in August 2009,
http://books.google.se/books?id=-EBGAAAAYAAJ

And sure enough, there it is,
http://clio.cul.columbia.edu:7018/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1439352
But will my error report to Worldcat find its way back
to CLIO? Or if I report the error to Columbia University,
will the correction propagate to Google, Hathi and Worldcat?
(Columbia asks me for a student ID when I want to give
feedback, so that removes this option for me.)

Searching Worldcat for this title without any diacritics
yields two results: This book from 1858 and another one
(with the A-ring on the right A) from 1855,
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kort+afhandling+om+angmachiner

The 1855 book has the author's name wrong,
Karl Bertil Lilliehoehoe instead of
Carl Bertil Lilliehöök, who lived 1809-1890,
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/249342164
I understand that "oe" is a poor man's transcription
of the umlaut "ö", but where did the -k go?
That Worldcat record doesn't indicate its source.
It's apparently not Hathi Trust.

I don't know how you work, but I think it would be
quite easy to extract all titles for a given language,
and run them through a spell checker, to find an
indication of where there could be mistakes. For
example, "afhandling" means treatise or dissertation,
and brings up 32,000 hits in a Worldcat search (the
modern spelling "avhandling" yields 140,000), but
"åfhandling" is not in any dictionary. (It's obvious
that Google Books never tried this.)


-- 
   Lars Aronsson ([log in to unmask])
   Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/