Mass production of everything inspires fear and worry (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) of quality. Until the middle ages spinning was done on a spindle. People said the quality of wool spun on the wheels was lower, though it increased production. Later the more industrialized machines increased volume further. Again people said quality decreased as quantity increased.
That’s something else I’ve been thinking about lately. The volume of information both accessible “online” & unaccessible except through gatekept systems (in libraries or in books/print materials only) has skyrocketed. Part of my job is to help libraries scale up to the volume of information available to them electronically. We don’t deal with nearly as many titles as OCLC, but we track around 4000 databases (and have more that we don’t track), and have around 1.3M journals & …3M? ebooks? Everyone knows that LoC doesn’t have all titles cataloged. And OCLC considers us a competitor so though we’ve tried to work something out with them, we’ve thus far not come to a workable agreement (and OCLC doesn’t have everything cataloged either, not by a long shot!). I have two catalogers and there’s no way we have time to catalog all of it, much less the $$$ to pay outsourced catalogers to catalog all of the remaining & ever increasing content we have libraries that are subscribed to. We have a autocreate program that uses publisher info to make brief MARC records based on publisher info to cover the things for which we don’t have full records. At least there’s *some* record that way otherwise no record means no way to search for it for our client libraries. We also buy Bowker records (created from publisher info sent to Bowker as part of establishing the ISBN), which also informs LoC’s CIP program, and we’re increasingly reaching out directly to publishers for MARC records for their content with decidedly mixed results.
The long and the short of it is — no record means no access. A “poor” record may not provide all the various access points that one might wish to exploit, but it catches the major ones of title, author, publisher, and a few other data points (barring diacritics issues in various programs along the way which is something we definitely struggle with).
Libraries are backlogged in cataloging some several years behind. There’s just a lot of material out there requiring metadata and no one in the library world, libraries, vendors, or anyone else, can keep up with it. No one in the internet world can keep up with it either, but the expectation is much lower there. Library, catalog thyself! If we use “lower quality records” to provide some degree of access while we painfully slowly bring up quality (millions of records with two catalogers is not something one does over night), at least we are trying to provide some access for everything instead of waiting for everything to be fully & perfectly cataloged… Quality vs. Quantity, you can have two of anything: Time – Cost – Quality… We’re trying so hard to provide as much quality as we can, but… damn, the quantity & pace at which that quantity is growing is Freaking Insane.
