Evaluation of Corc Records: Limtations of Metadata*

In this study, an attempt has been made to evaluate a small sample of CORC (Co-operative Online Resource Catalog of OCLC) record to determine whether they are true representations of their websites. Following methodology is used in this study. The CORC database was searched using keywords in the field of social services and humanities. From the search listing, fifteen titles were randomly chosen. The descriptive fields, namely, author, title, and notes sections in the MARC and Dublin Core (DC) displays of each record were evaluated by comparing them with the actual website and its source page for differences if any. Then, AACR2 and its revised Chapter 9 were consulted to see whether they could provide guidance to resolve the perceived differences. Analysis under following parameters were carried out Author vs. Creator, What is a Title with respect to Webpages, contents Information, and Series, Recognition of Inter- Relatedness Between Entities. It is observed that there is a possibility for the CORC records to misrepresent the creator of the website as th author in the MARC display even when he/she is not author as per AACR2 definition. It is also suggested that the Summary element (5xx) in DC display can be broken into four types: (1) General summary, (2) Link notes: list of links that are mentioned on the website, (3) Content notes: list of contents on the website, and (4) Present notes: list of items from external sited that are reproduced on the website verbatim. It is noted that the discrepancy can be reduced by introducing an element (uniform title) into existing metadata set.