An Analytical Study of Typographical Errors in OPACs and Corrective Measures

Surendran CherukodanG.Santhosh KumarSheeja N K Cochin University (CUSAT) Humayoon Kabir SUniversity of Kerala

Deals with Typographical errors in OPAcs

Typographical errors are the mistaken addition, deletion, transposition or substitution of letters or other characters in a word, or the addition or deletion of spaces within or between words (Gardner, 1992).

The problem of spelling mistakes is a global phenomenon (Ballard 2008).

Introduction

The spelling mistakes occurred during data entry work are left unnoticed by library professionals

Typos affects the quality of OPACs

Block access to an available item

Problem

Previous Research

Previou

s

Resea

rch

Terry Ballard

Whether the problem exists ?

The word “management’ was chosen for search – example

Search conducted on local, national and international library OPACs by deliberately typing in possible variation of the word

It was found that “management” is wrongly entered in several OPACs

Present Study

Management –error variants

Management-Error Variants

in-house

When importing

When source itself having error

The Problem Occurs

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/

Amazon

Human Intelligence- Proof reading, careful attention –in-house, importing, copying.

Check your catalogue with the list of word produced by Ballard

Receiving authority records from Co-operative programmes- NACO

Listserv –Blogs - etc

Corrective measures