The
fully spelled out forms were not in the bib records
themselves. I provided translations of the LC codes as part
of my indexing process.
Karen,
are you saying that “Author of Introduction” and “Author of
Screenplay” are incorrect renderings of the LC codes?
Wow,
I just looked up the relator codes and can see that there
are two tables that don’t quite match. I used this one:
http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relacode.html
And you probably used this one:
http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relaterm.html
As
you will see, “aus” translates to “Author of screenplay” in
the first table, not “Author
of screenplay, etc.”.
Either way, the differences should not be considered
significant.
Roy,
another source of inconsistency to add to your list!
Ralph
I thank Ralph for providing the data from
the OCLC database. It is interesting, however I suspect that
it does not actually answer our question about how often roles
are "bad". In any case, here is my analysis of the data. (p.s.
I do not claim perfection in these numbers! Errors may have
been introduced! Do not read this as any kind of truth!)
First, caveats:
1. I have no idea what this set of 38 million names
represents. It may or may not tell us about data in general
outside of or even inside OCLC.
2. I do not know if these records have been through any
quality control applied by OCLC, so I do not know if the OCLC
data is the same as the data in local catalogs.
3. The OCLC file contains both codes and spelled out forms.
Some of these were obvious pairs, based on the fact that they
had the same exact number of occurrences. I did not de-dup
these in my data gathering.
e.g.:
Data:
38 million names produced 14,825,668 codes and full forms.
This would put about 40% of the names having a role. However,
since many were name/code pairs that probably were in the same
name field (and I didn't calculate how many) the number of
names in this list having roles is somewhere between 20% and
40%, probably toward the lower end.
Number of name/code pairs on LC list: 228
OCLC Names:
Total number of distinct names: 191
Total number of names matching LC list: 175
Total number of names not matching LC list: 16
Occurrences of names matching LC list: 7,202,345
Occurrences of non-matching names: 199,413
OCLC Codes:
Total number of distinct codes: 872
Total number of codes matching LC list: 210
Total number of codes not matching: 664 [1]
Occurrences of matching codes: 7,404,728
Occurrences of non-matching codes: 19,503
TOTAL: about 1.5% of instances are "bad". Removing the paired
instances (which
[1] Yes, I seem to be 2 off here - possibly due to headers in
XSL files or something. Not worth tracking down. If anyone
wants my data to compare to their own, I can send it.
SOME OBSERVATIONS
1) There were very few non-matching names, and in those, I did
not see an expected mix of languages. The full set of
non-matching names, including the nonsense ones, is:
Author of introduction 167949 [2]
Author of screenplay 27680
Curator 3753
Plaintiff -appellee 9
Contestant -appellee 4
eÌd 4 [3]
Graphic technician 3
reÌ 2
seÌ 2
Respondent -appellee 1
kè 1
meÌ 1
öv 1
př 1
røm 1
øga 1
[2] Most of these "bad" names are close variations on the LC
list, missing ", etc.". This could either be a problem with
how the data was produced or how I manipulated it.
[3] Yes, some of these are probably actually bad codes - I
separated codes from names by > 3 chars, so bad codes with
Unicode characters and other garbage ended up here. Their
occurrence numbers are low, however.
3) There were many more bad codes than bad names. The top ten
"bad" codes were:
|
csn
|
3678
|
|
cnm
|
2423
|
|
9pu
|
1104
|
|
fme
|
990
|
|
ens
|
899
|
|
for
|
735
|
|
orc
|
735
|
|
sde
|
715
|
|
dir
|
405
|
|
730
|
387
|
3) Like the stats on MARC fields and subfields, both names and
codes have a long tail of nonsense. This long tail, however,
accounts for very few occurrences. Which is why, although
there are many more "bad" codes than "bad" names, the actual
number of bad codes is low -- they are mostly one-offs.
MY CONCLUSIONS
Role names seem to have been pretty carefully
quality-controlled in OCLC; codes less so, or there was a
problem in the creation of the dataset.
Non-English roles do not seem to be represented here.
kc
--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
