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Oakley's Commentary on Database Quality |
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By Bruce W. Oakley Newsroom libraries serve a dual purpose: Preserving historical records And providing information. In the good old days of clip files, the artifact and the information were the same -- the clip being a physical record of the information. Keeping corrections meant placing a new corrective clip in proximity to the original flawed one, and trusting that users of the clip file could not see one without the other. Comes the digital age, and artifact and information are no longer the same. A clip is an exact physical copy and one can confidently claim, "This article was published on this day in this paper." A digital record is a computer translation of that information, and the faithfulness of its match to the newsprint page depends on the quality of the system that produced it. The confidence with which one can claim, "This article was published on this day in this paper," depends on the trust in and knowledge of that computer system. I studied these issues for four months last year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and found that there are no short cuts in quality control. Systems must be designed so that page makeup and editorial components link seamlessly -- and changes made in one place are reflected in the other. The archival version of an article should be the one that comes from final page makeup. I found in my study that this is more difficult to manage than it sounds. It takes people and programming -- and commitment. This process will never produce as accurate a record as a microfilm copy or bound volume -- for legal purposes, these artifacts are still essential. The digital record better fits the second part of the library's dual purpose - - easy access to information. And here's where I think a new approach to corrections is needed. I believe most people retrieving digital records want accurate background information on a subject -- unless they're working on a lawsuit, the original wording of a newspaper article is less important than the information. For example, a reporter looking for information about a car wreck Involving John Doe -- D-O-E -- doesn't care that the newspaper originally published Doe's name D-O-U-G-H, and in fact might not be able to find the article if that error remained in the file. We have the capability to correct the digital record at the point of error, so that the error cannot be repeated merely by retrieval. We also have a duty to point out that this is a change from the original, however, for those few folks who do need to know exactly what was published. A flag on the correction should send such searchers to the artifact -- microfilm or bound volume -- for that sort of match. This is the scheme I employ at Arkansas Online -- I personally handle All the corrections to articles on our Web site. I fix the live article at the point of error, highlight the change in red and include notes in red at the top and bottom of the file that it has been modified. We also post a correction notice in the index for the section in which the article appeared in its original form. And, since we post electronic reproductions of newsprint pages, we also post a correction notice on the index to these artifacts, which can't be altered at the point of error. My version of these correction notices is in fact more informative than the newsprint version, because I give the page number and headline so that any reader calling up the flawed page can easily find the offending article. Again, there are no short cuts for all of this. I have to find and fix the articles, cut and paste headlines for the correction notices and post the corrections in several places. But I would rather retrieve information from an amended article on my Web site than from one in the archive, where the correction notice appears at the top of the file and the original bad information remains available. The right information is what I want.
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| Copyright 2003 - The Park Library - School of Journalism and Mass Communication - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |