Maintenance on a Shoestring: Bibliographic
Database Clean-up and Authority Control in a State-Wide Shared Catalog
Shelley Wood Burgett
, Somerset Community & Technical College
Bettie George Frye, Ashland Community & Technical College
Kathleen Richardson, Bluegrass Community and Technical College
The Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) was established by the Kentucky Postsecondary Education Improvement Act of 1997 and comprises 16 colleges with over 65 campuses and other locations open or under construction and enrollment in Fall 2005 of more than 81,000 students. Each college is autonomous, and each college's library or libraries are independent entities as far as funding, collections, staff, and procedures are concerned. The colleges' libraries do share a Voyager ILS database of over 780,000 item records and 530,000 bibliographic records but are otherwise autonomous, so catalogers at the individual campuses have agreed to share procedures and cooperate in removing identified errors. The KCTC System is set up with only two KCTC System-level librarians to handle all consortial library services and concerns, and other assistance is generally not available. For these reasons, much maintenance-especially record clean-up and routine authority control-is done after the fact at individual libraries, as problems are identified by OPAC users or catalogers, or after batch loads are scrutinized. Three of these catalogers discuss their work organization, cooperative agreements for maintenance, and on-going and special clean-up projects, including problems caused by vendor record loads for e-books and implementing recent changes in Library of Congress name headings