PREDICTION OF OPAC SPELLING-ERRORS THROUGH A KEYWORD INVENTORY

In order to find and correct spelling errors in the online public access catalog at Adelphi University, a visual inspection was performed of the 117,000 keywords indexed in the system. More than 1,000 errors were found. Certain long but common words such as administration, education, and commercial were found to generate many different misspellings. Most of the records were derived from bibliographic utilities, so the findings can be generalized to other OPACs. The same misspellings were also found in substantial numbers in CD-ROM databases. Misspellings were analyzed by the machine-readable catalog (MARC) field in which they were found, part of speech, and type of mistake. Lists of commonly misspelled root words and specific mistakes are included.