MARC records for LION database

["Corinna Baksik" <cbaksik@gmail.com>]

[please excuse cross-postings]

I would like to publicly raise concerns regarding the MARC 
records for the full-text titles in the LION database (Literature 
Online). The MARC records (over 16,000) are available from the 
vendor at no additional cost to subscribers to the full database.

Our intention at Harvard was to load these records into our 
catalog, but close analysis reveals that they are problematic and 
of poor quality. I have written a document describing the 
problems in detail and posted it here: 
<http://ois.harvard.edu/%7Ecorinna/docs/LION_problems.pdf>

I am interested in whether other libraries would like to approach 
the vendor as a group and work with them to address these issues. 
It is my understanding that this is a popular database and good 
MARC records would be very valuable to subscribers. I would 
appreciate any comments or suggestions you have. We are 
investigating whether resolution of these problems can be brought 
about through license negotiations, but the more subscribers that 
are concerned about the quality of the records, the better.

In short, there are three issues that concern me most:

1) The truncation of titles in the 245, e.g. the MARC record 
contains "The poems" when the original work is entitled "The 
poems of Maria Lowell."

2) The inconsistent use of brackets in the title field:
            [Poems, in] The loyalist poetry of the Revolution
            The word of Congress ; the factious demagogue. a portrait [In,
 	   The loyalist poetry of the Revolution]

3) Lack of uniform titles, e.g. MARC record contains "The 
tragedie of King Richard the Second" and no uniform title for 
"King Richard II."

Please feel free to contact me on or off list. I will summarize feedback.

Thank you,

Corinna Baksik

Systems Librarian
Harvard University Library