October 9, 2007 - Medival

Medival for Medieval is found on the B, or very high probability, section of Typographical errors in library databases, meaning that it generated at least 16 hits in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. This morning, it was still giving 22 hits there. Most importantly for your library, the typo was found in 77 titles today in WorldCat. Is this careless typing or do people have trouble spelling this word? In Google, there are exactly 409,000 hits today. Tomorrow, there will be 409,001 because Google indexes this blog within hours.

October 8, 2007 - Colubm*

Colubm* for Columbus or Columbia gets us in the mood for the celebration of Columbus Day 2007. This was an unusual choice because the typo is not yet on the main list at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html. Since it was present 7 times this morning in OhioLINK, we expect it to be on the Low Probability, or D section, of the list in future revisions. The image below is of Columbus Circle in New York City.

October 5, 2007 - Conneticut

Conneticut for Connecticut is found on the B, or high probability, list of the Libtypos project at Catalogers in Connecticut libraries need to be wary of this one due to the fact that they have a lot of books about their own state. Even the Orbis catalog at Yale displays 18 hits for Conneticut and the University of Connecticut shows 12. The WorldCat catalog has more than 200, so it is a typo to watch.

October 4, 2007 - treee

You'd think that you would never see a hit set for the typo treee. But you do, although the odds are very low. This typo came on to our list at the bottom probability level, truncated as treee*.

This morning we found the same hit count in OhioLINK and WorldCat for treee and treee* - 1 and 19 hits respectively. Moving beyond library catalogs, we found 1 hit for treee in Infotrac and 8 in ProQuest Direct.

October 3, 2007 - Vermon

Vermon for Vermont is in the D, or Low Probability, section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases, meaning that it was found 2-7 times in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. We give our standard disclaimer that a cataloger should never correct this without first checking the individual record for context. We got 76 hits for this in WorldCat, but it was a mixed bag, to say the least. In some cases, it was a legitimate first or last name. It could possibly be a typo for vermin or even sermon. Always check.

October 2, 2007 - Octber

Octber for October came on to the "Typographical errors in library databases" list in the moderate (8-15 hits in OhioLINK) category as the truncation "Octb." This morning, the truncated search got only 3 hits in OhioLINK - due to the fact that catalogers in those libraries pay attention to the work we do. Missing vowels are the number one culprits around here, although missing "o's" are far less likely than missing "i's." You will find 27 Octbers today in WorldCat, although some of them have a 'sic' to inform us that the mistake was on the title page of the work. This week's photography (and postings) provided by Terry Ballard.

October 1, 2007 - Ocober

Ocober for October - what could be more in tune with the times? This can be found on the 'D' or low probability list at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html
Checking Google we find a modest (for Google) 70,000 hits for the typo. More to the point for librarians, there are 35 hits in WorldCat, and many of these show up in title fields - arguably the worst kind of typo. To highlight the international aspect of this work, we checked Iris, the combined university catalog in Ireland at www.iris.ie/ and found 2 hits in the catalog of Trinity. There are other variations of October still to be seen, so stay tuned.