We were delighted with the response to our data quality consultation. We had 22 responses, which were detailed and informative. We’d like to thank everyone who participated for the time, effort, and thought that they put into their responses.
In general, respondents thought the documents were clear and the field categories broadly appropriate. Most of the respondents said that they thought they were likely to find some or all of the proposed utilities useful, but there was strong desire to be able to test things out in a pilot. We will make the pilot another chance to give feedback on the quality measures.
The questionnaire responses included lots of detail about suggested tweaks and changes to specific fields. Some themes that emerged are:
- Make sure fields/subfields/indicators are valid in relation to the other fields in the record
- Consider including fields that are relevant to specific formats
- RDA-specific field checks
- Suggestions for some 5XX fields to be added – most commonly 505 and 520, but plenty of others suggested, again with reference to different formats
- Agreement that records need 008s
We have been working on revising the quality measures with reference to these suggestions, and the new version is now available NBK Record Quality Measures Pilot.
It’s worth noting that we haven’t been able to incorporate all of the suggestions we received. There are things that aren’t currently technically possible, and others which would increase the complexity and processing time to an unfeasible level. We will be regularly reviewing the quality measures to see if it is possible to implement some of these more complex suggestions.
As well as asking about the proposed quality measures, we asked how respondents would feel about commercial data suppliers having access (for a fee) to the quality assessment tool. There was a general feeling that tools that allowed for improved data quality at the supplier end would be of benefit to the sector, but libraries wanted to see some reciprocal benefits, such as freely-available or cheaper metadata. This links with our Plan M work.
