Everybody has his own way! A comparison of two ways of retrospective conversion

Abstract

To meet the requirement of the universal availability of publications, having finished the retrospective conversion of catalogues in various libraries with national responsibilities and in county libraries, the time has come to continue this work in smaller special collections as well. The paper wishes to compare the work processes and results of two recent large projects. Each project applied an automatic solution for retroconversion, but the approaches were completely different. One of the projects – in the Library of the Hungarian Museum for Military History – processed more than 20,000 catalogue cards, while the other one – at the Library of the Hungarian Dance Academy – covered 16,000 cards. The method of retroconversion was completely different with the two projects. In the first case, each entry in the online catalogue originated in printed catalogue cards. In the other case the records were downloaded from a shared catalogue system after they had been retrieved using certain data elements detected in the scanned text of catalogue cards, and the entries were completed with local data. In the first case the segmentation of data and data groups was carried out after the migration of data strings, based on punctuation, as available from a database using the Huntéka ILS DBMS software. In the other case the scanning and text analysis of cards was done only to obtain some identifying units for the retrieval of bibliographic records. The database of cards having been scanned and segmented based on punctuation needed naturally more operative work in the second part of the project as compared to the database built of downloaded records, especially because of the big amount of non-identifiable authority records. The article gives an overview for both projects of the considerations which have led to using the methods chosen, indicates the problems that occurred during the project, presents the costs of both solutions, and finally, tries to conclude general lessons.