For those who have missed it, Blackwell North America offers a tables-of-contents service as an option for those purchasing MARC records from it. The company made the decision to add the service after determining that recent studies of online catalog subject searches in large databases show that when multiple hits are retrieved, the average number is 170. That is far too many for a patron to review in the stacks. Being able to determine, from the catalog, the relevance of material by examining the tables-of-contents online should be a marked improvement.
Each year Blackwell North America's Approval and New Titles Service covers over 50,000 titles. After focusing on a subset of the whole in 1992, the company decided to include tables-of-contents for all 50,000 titles in 1993. Upon publication, the tables-of-contents for new titles are electronically scanned and converted to machine-readable text. Editors review the data, perform quality control, and flag individual elements in preparation for MARC formatting. The editing process involves provision for deleting irrelevant data elements that may appear (e.g., contents, acknowledgements, foreword, preface, etc.), deleting pagination and other non-essential elements, and standardization routines. The contents data is added to the 505 field of the MARC record in conformity with current LC MARC and ISBN punctuation standards. Names and relevant key words within the tables-of-contents are optionally processed through BNA's authority control system and included in the record as authorized added entries.
The records are deliverable as part of complete LC MARC records or as part of a MARC Enrichment Service. Access is available on the Internet.
The tables-of-contents option, which BNA designates Toe/Sos, adds approximately $.75 to the cost of a MARC bibliographic record.
The first known customer of the service is the University of California, Santa Barbara, a NOTIS site. BNA will provide TOC/505 enrichment on all ongoing cataloging on a monthly basis.
[Contact: Blackwell North America, 6024 SW Jean Road, Lake Oswego, OR 97035; (800) 547-6426 in the U.S.; (800) 626-1807 in Canada.]
