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Digging into the Spanish Depósito Legal identifier (part 3)

Time again to dive a bit further into the Spanish depósito legal identifiers to date releases.

It is highly recommended to read part 1 and part 2 first before reading this article.

Using depósito legal to date a release

The year that is embedded in the depósito legal can be used to date a release, but there are a few things to keep in mind. For that it is necessary to know a little bit more about the depósito legal.

To get a depósito legal number on a release you first have to apply for it. The release is then assigned a number by the library. This number is then to be printed on the release. This means that the release could never have been prior to the year embedded in the depósito legal number, unless the depósito legal number has been misprinted.

However, the depósito legal number could be in the past: maybe a depósito legal was applied for, and then the release was postponed. Or, it was applied for in December and the release was made in January the next year. It is also common to reuse a depósito legal number for a reissue.

In a this article I will look at how many releases exist where the release date recorded in the database is earlier than the year in the depósito legal, which should not be possible.

I took the data dump from October 2017 and looked at just the releases from Spain (ignoring the releases with a valid Spanish Depósito Legal field where the country was set to something else) and grabbed both the year and the value for depósito legal to see how many releases had a release year earlier than indicated in the Depósito Legal field.

First some statistics: in the data dump I looked at there are 31641 releases with a Depósito Legal field declared. There are about the same amount of releases with known Depósito Legal related smells, which are slowly being fixed.
On October 31 2017 there were about as many releases with a Depósito Legal field as there were releases that had a known Depósito Legal smell.
I updated my scripts to check Discogs data dumps and ran some tests for a few smells:
  • invalid years in the Depósito Legal field (years < 1900, or > 2017)
  • release date (in the Released field) earlier than the year in the Depósito Legal field, indicating an error in either the Depósito Legal field or the Released field
  • incomplete Depósito Legal field values that have no year component
Around 460 releases where the release year was earlier than the depósito legal number (which is impossible, as a depósito legal value can only be printed on the record after it has been obtained) were found. I had a friend look into these and he focused mainly on releases where the difference between the two values was more than 1 year. He found a mixture of several errors:
  • keyboard errors (people hitting the wrong key)
  • copy/paste errors from earlier releases that were used as a template
  • wrong dates for either the release
  • wrong depósito legal numbers
  • depósito legal numbers that were incomplete (and the match would be on the middle part of the number, which is not the year and should be fixed in the cleanup scripts)
Around 80 releases had an "impossible" depósito legal year component:
  • wrong format (hyphens missing)
  • digits missing
  • extra digits
  • keyboard errors (placing some releases in the 17th century or earlier)
It was interesting to see that some people used a regular hyphen (from the ASCII character set), while others used a so called Unicode "en dash", possibly forced on them by their keyboard layout, or operating system, or perhaps it was personal preference. They might look very similar on screen, but data wise they are not! This is definitely something to put on my list of things to check.
Some people use a Unicode 'en dash' instead of an ASCII hyphen as a separator.
The whole list of releases that are incorrect will soon be shared with the wider Discogs community, so they can be fixed. I am expecting that with ongoing fixing of releases that more errors will pop up.

Next time: checking whether or not represses and reissues that have not been tagged as such can also easily be found.
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