[DCRM-L] OCLC proposal

[Ann W. Copeland]

At the Bibliographic Standards Committee meeting in San Diego, I offered 
to draft a proposal to OCLC to omit all dcrm, dcrb and bdrb records from 
automatic deduping.  Here is a draft - please send comments. Thank you, 
Annie


*Request to OCLC to protect records coded 040 $e "bdrb" or "dcrb" or 
"dcrm-"*
*from any and all mergers. *

In Jan. 2010, OCLC began running duplicate detection software which 
allows for machine matches and mergers. OCLC's Cataloging Defensively 
Webinar, "When to Input a New Record in the Age of DDR," encouraged 
catalogers to supply edition statements in square brackets when there 
are true differences between bibliographic entities that would be 
matched and merged in the absence of the MARC 250.

DCRM(B) and DCRM(S) rules, however, do not allow catalogers to supply an 
edition statement. The area is a transcription area only. In addition, 
trying to devise an edition statement when one is not there is also 
extremely problematic, especially in the case of concealed editions - 
closely similar editions printed from substantially different settings 
of type - which are not distinguished as such by the printer and/or 
publisher but require separate records.

In a message from Glenn Patton forwarded to the dcrm-l email list by 
Jackie Dooley on May 20, 2010, he assured us that :

"OCLC's Duplicate Detection and Resolution software (DDR) does not merge 
records if one of the imprint dates is pre-1800, nor would OCLC staff 
merge records in this situation unless it were absolutely clear that the 
records represented the same item (but we would be willing to work with 
someone who had gone through the effort of working out which were true 
duplicates and which weren't). While the matching software used to load 
records prepared in external systems into WorldCat is very similar to 
that used in DDR, it does not include the pre-1800 exclusion. We could 
consider some more complex exclusions that would be based on the 040 $e 
coding (e.g., exclude all with a 'dcrb[x]' code and  its predecessor 
codes) if the rare book community felt this would be desirable... It 
would be useful to carry forward this discussion with the rare book 
community. Nobody wants to play "fast and loose" with record merging, 
but, on the other hand, I don't think people really want a situation 
where there's no attempt to match at all."

At ALA Midwinter 2011, the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee 
decided to ask OCLC to protect all items cataloged according to 040 ++e 
"bdrb" or "dcrb" or "dcrm-" from machine mergers. Because the DCRM suite 
of cataloging rules has been written to include materials from all 
periods, not just pre 1801 items, OCLC's protection of pre-1801 records 
offers insufficient protection to the range of materials likely to be 
cataloged according to DCRM.


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