ProQuest: quality control not a concern
Originally published at x-posted from clifflandis.net. You can comment here or there.
This week I had a user come to me frustrated because she was unable to find articles in a ProQuest database. I noted that the journal issue she browsed only had a single article listed. I knew this was an error, so I reported it. This is what I heard back:
Unfortunately, it looks like ProQuest will not be changing this indexing error
because no content is actually missing. Here is the response from the ProQuest
Content Department:
==
This is a known issue. The method used to load some of the older content resulted in
some records loading to duplicate page collections. The manufacturing system does
not allow for documents to be moved from one collection to another. It would involve
a manual process of deleting and re-creating the records. Since no content is
missing no resources were ever allocated to clean up these issues.
==?
So basically, ProQuest is telling me that even though the data is completely useless since it is unfindable, that this isn’t a problem, because at least it’s there.
This makes me angry on a variety of levels. Let’s go down the list, shall we?
- My user’s problem with locating content that they are paying for with their tuition isn’t important in the eyes of ProQuest. After all, they’ve already got their money, so what should they care?
- Information quality control is of little to no concern for ProQuest. They need to allocate their resources elsewhere.
- I should never bother reporting problems to ProQuest ever again, since they obviously don’t care about end users being able to use their products.
I’m sure I’ll hear from ProQuest on this one issue (hello power of social media!), and I’m sure they’ll resolve it in short order. But that still won’t solve the larger problem of quality control or addressing errors in the system.
Working with technology, there have been plenty of times where I’ve had to manually update records and web pages. It’s dull, tedious work, yes. But I do it - as do all of us who work in information control. We do it because we know that somewhere down the line, someone is going to need this stuff. And the moment that an error is brought to our attention, we work on fixing it, because as information professionals we provide the best information resources possible. Because that’s our job.