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MicroCheck is provided by the vendor, a company that sells books, library supplies and automated services to libraries, as part of a catalog conversion service that company offers. That is, converting catalog records to machine‐readable form. The vendor maintains computer‐stored cataloging records. During the conversion process these are matched against the customer library's own cataloging records. The price of the conversion process is based on the number of matches anticipated between these two sets of records.

This paper aims to describe work at Kent State University Libraries and Media Services to promote and devise electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) storage at OhioLINK's ETD Center, to find efficient methods to represent these unique scholarly materials within the library's catalog, and to foster the establishment of state‐wide library catalog standards for ETDs.

A semi‐automated process has been devised that extracts student‐supplied metadata already available in the OhioLINK ETD Center to provide almost instantaneous access to unique resources through the library catalog. A Perl program uses the OAI‐PMH protocol to extract metadata, modifies and enhances the data, and inserts it into the Innovative Interfaces, Inc. catalog. Significant effort was made to map the data from ETD‐MS to MARC. Catalogers retrieve records for completion and contribute full bibliographic records to OCLC WorldCat in addition to the local and consortium catalogs.

The process successfully produces a provisional bibliographic record that is useful immediately for resource discovery and that can serve as the basis for full cataloging.

This research provides libraries with a method they can adapt locally to provide provisional level access, full level access, or both, to unique scholarly research.

This research broke new ground regarding the use of a software agent to repurpose metadata in library catalogs. It also impacted national cataloging standards for ETDs.

Political correctness, also known as “PC,” has generated much discussion on both the Right and the Left. The greatest debate comes from college campuses. Political correctness derives from the principle that ethnic diversity, i.e., multiculturalism, can and should be preserved and protected. Ironically, the term originated in the Marxist era, when it was used to enforce conformity in the advancement of a particular Marxist view. The term became obsolete until it was revived in the 1980s (D'Souza, 1991).