Monitoring Database Quality

As a natural corollary to the clearing-house activities, CIQM monitored the range and numbers of quality issues reported. A series of annual reports alerted the industry to the concerns being expressed by their users and several conference papers and journal articles were generated. While reported quality issues were normally investigated and corrected, the larger publicity - some of it adverse - stemming from the monitoring had the effect, as with any consumer organisation, of generating action, and the quality of databases can be seen to have improved since CIQM was set up. The international debates on information quality have gradually influenced the information industry's approach to the storage, retrieval and presentation of data, and formal databases are much improved since the early days when missing, mis-spelled or mistaken data affected recall and precision.

The Centre's remit has now extended to include Internet resources and work is underway on a survey of Web page quality.