Good but not quite great

Over the past few weeks I have had to frequently use Amicus, the Canadian National Catalogue, a service maintained by Library and Archives Canada. One of the important feature of this service is that it shows which libraries (of those that participate in the program) have copies of particular items. Also, Amicus acts as the catalogue of Library and Archives Canada, Canada's national library. While this is typically a relatively pleasant experience, there are a few quirks that I haven't been able to figure our, or don't quite like.

One of the more useful features relates to call numbers. When Amicus lists the various libraries that have a particular item they also indicate whether or not it is available for inter-library loan, and what the local call number is. This last feature is something that I have been finding increasingly useful as one tends to be able to view a range of call number, or classification numbers, that have been assigned to a given book. Not only does this help overcome some of the inadequacies of the Library of Congress Classification schedules indexes, it can give some insight into how others have approached the classification of a particular item.

Unfortunately, poor indexing makes finding particular items more difficult than it should be. Because the catalogue records are culled from catalogues maintained by other libraries, not all records are of the same quality or follow the same rules. One of the most problematic and noticeable of these irregularities is the frequent inclusion of the leading article in the 'title' field. Because articles are not always included or ignored one has to perform two searches, one with the article and one without, when browsing a listing of available titles.

A related problem is one of multiple records for the same item. As records are gather electronically, without human interference, even small differences result in an additional record being created rather than the integration of the holdings information into a single record (as would be desirable). While I do see that this is a difficult problem to overcome it makes looking for items with minor differences difficult, particularly if the records lack detail and specificity.

More interesting is that sometimes a library's catalogue will show that they have something, but the item is not reflected in the location list in Amicus. At first I thought that this must be associated to update frequency and changes to the local catalogue, but upon further inspection it seems that items catalogued years ago are not being reflected in the Amicus records. Now that my seemingly plausible theory has been shot down I have no idea what explains they differences.

In a more limited number of cases the opposite of the above situation occurs. In some cases Amicus indicates a library has something but then the library's own catalogue indicates that they do not actually have the item. Fortunately, I am not involved with inter-library loan activities, but if I was I am sure that these problems would be pretty frustrating.