Clearing House

The Centre was originally formed to help online database users raise issues of data quality with the appropriate organisations, be it database produce or vendor. It had become apparent that users – both professional and end users – were unable to distinguish between quality issues that stemmed from the information providers and those that stemmed from the vendors or aggregators. Additionally, they were often unwilling to commit the time to reporting the issue in what was felt to be a fruitless exercise.

CIQM set up a simple reporting mechanism and undertook to communicate the issue to the appropriate organisation and to follow it up, reporting back to the original complainant. A large number of issues were reported, investigated and corrected. These ranged from bibliographic records with missing authors, mis-typed descriptors, wrongly entered factual information (e.g. name of publisher or place of publication) or wrongly formatted numeric codes to factual data such as addresses which were incorrect. Often fields were simply left empty. In many cases these errors meant that the record would not be retrieved in a search.

The Centre recorded hundreds of such quality issues, reported them to the body responsible for the data or the specific implementation of the database, and was able to report a subsequent correction to the user. Often this was a long process as even if the database producer corrected the error, it could be many months before the information provider (vendor, aggregator) was able to reload the database completely. Most more-regular updates are simply an appending of records and databases are often not completely reloaded more than once a year.

Four examples of quality issues are shown on a separate page...