On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 3:25 PM, William Gunn <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestion, Kyle. Where would you suggest I go to look
> up the titles?
>

I haven't read OCLC's terms and conditions for some time, but my first
reaction would be to use their stuff if permitted since that's where you'll
find the best data and it's easy to query.   Another route would be to just
do the lookup in some major library catalog (preferably a major
consortia). If you have access to a major database, dumping a bunch of
records, extracting/normalizing titles, and checking against that is a
reasonable course of action.

Note that the abbreviated titles you see in those lists are key titles and
not just any 'ol abbreviations -- if you do the appropriate search, you'll
retrieve the full title, and if it already is the full title you'll find
out right away since it will match MARC 245

In the problem were mine, I'd take the lazy man's approach and not worry
about it. Few people put in more than a couple hundred citations in any
publication and fixing abbreviated titles would represent a minuscule
amount of the total time using a particular resource. Plus, people have
gotten loose 'n easy with punctuation in recent times so hardly anyone will
care and the few that do can be dismissed as wackos... ;-)

kyle