An Analytical Study of Typographical Errors in OPACs and Corrective Measures Surendran Cherukodan G.Santhosh Kumar Sheeja N K Cochin University (CUSAT) Humayoon Kabir S University 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
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
in-house When importing When source itself having error
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