What You See May Not Be What You Get:

Current issues of nearly 300 social science and humanities periodicals received by a large academic library were compared with their records in the OCLC database. Over 18% of the records contained errors, indicating that the bibliographic information had not been kept up to date as there were changes in the issues over time. The search for out of date data was confined primarily to the place of publication, publisher and editor areas of the record. The study confirmed that information appearing in automated databases is not necessarily more correct than that found in paper files just because it is in machine-readable form.