E-Book "Good Enough" Collection Notes and Field Recommendations

Defining and determining what is "good enough" in CZ collection for the e-book record in Alma and for discovery in Primo.

San Marcos reply to Good Enough question:

Safari records are downloaded straight from the vendor back office site.  We like this approach as opposed to using the e-collection CZ records for a few reasons.

• Typically the Safari vendor records are better quality than the CZ records
• The Safari vendor records include OCLC#s
• The vendor records represent what is actually in our subscription package while what is available in the CZ collection may not match our subscribed title list
• We don’t mind continuing this work and incorporate into the NZ environment is that is desired

Because of the massive size of ebrary Academic Complete package we decided to just let that one go with the CZ collection L  The CZ records are pretty bad for much of this collection (I don’t consider records are ‘good enough’ but we use them anyway)

In my opinion the elements to deem a record ‘good enough’ at minimum would be:

• Accurate title entries (sometimes CZ records use the series statement as title proper or the series statement is left out of the record entirely)
• Accurate author entries (sometimes the CZ records don’t have author entries at all)
• ISBNs
• LC subject heading

Would be nice to have:

• More than one LC subject
• TOC
• Summary

I’m not so sure about eBook representation in PCI – would need to dig a little deeper on that aspect.

Reply from Wisconsin on notes from San Marcos:

“The list provided is a good one, but another factor to consider is whether the titles in the CZ collection exactly match the titles to which your institution has access.  This is rarely the case for purchased/leased e-books, and for this reason (as well as record quality) we rarely activate e-books in the CZ (except for pre-purchased PDA/EBA collections).”