Time to dive into one of my pet subjects: the Spanish depósito legal numbers on releases. For morebackground information about this specific identifier it is recommended to first read parts 1, 2 and 3.
I like the depósito legal number, as it gives good information about when a release was made, or at least it gives a lower bound cut off value (sometimes these numbers are used for reissues as well). But there are people who either don't understand the importance of this identifier, or don't care. This is not just people contributing to Discogs but also people making the releases, as there are many incomplete or impossible versions printed on releases. Especially the latter is weird, as it would be similar to misprinting the ISBN number on a book (although I am sure that must happen as well!).
So, I looked at a few smells that I search for to see how often they appear and where using the data dump made on April 1 2019. As always, the labels for the bars mean the range of releases in the Discogs database (currently above 13 million).
Interesting. The "Depósito Legal" field was made an option in BaOI some time ago, yet this particular error is mostly present in later releases. After a bit of digging through the data: the reason is that there is a single user that has added a lot of releases recently but didn't bother to use the correct field. Rankhunting time!
These don't happen too often, but they still appear every now and then. The peak can explained by the fact that DL only became a first class citizen in Discogs not too long ago, and there are lots of errors hidden in either notes sections, or the "Other" field in BaOI or other entries in BaOI, which is next
It is clear when the DL field was added and this graph confirms suspicions of the previous graph.
I am sure there are other interesting statistics that can be derived from this, but I will leave that for another time.
I like the depósito legal number, as it gives good information about when a release was made, or at least it gives a lower bound cut off value (sometimes these numbers are used for reissues as well). But there are people who either don't understand the importance of this identifier, or don't care. This is not just people contributing to Discogs but also people making the releases, as there are many incomplete or impossible versions printed on releases. Especially the latter is weird, as it would be similar to misprinting the ISBN number on a book (although I am sure that must happen as well!).
So, I looked at a few smells that I search for to see how often they appear and where using the data dump made on April 1 2019. As always, the labels for the bars mean the range of releases in the Discogs database (currently above 13 million).
Depósito Legal in the Barcode field
First: when do people use the barcode field? When adding a field in "Barcodes and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) the default choice is "Barcode" and some people might not change it. That looks like this:Interesting. The "Depósito Legal" field was made an option in BaOI some time ago, yet this particular error is mostly present in later releases. After a bit of digging through the data: the reason is that there is a single user that has added a lot of releases recently but didn't bother to use the correct field. Rankhunting time!
Impossible years
Another one: impossible years. Although some of these are false positives due to errors in my scripts (I need to fix those) most of these are misspellings, for example "1191" instead of "1991" for the year component:These don't happen too often, but they still appear every now and then. The peak can explained by the fact that DL only became a first class citizen in Discogs not too long ago, and there are lots of errors hidden in either notes sections, or the "Other" field in BaOI or other entries in BaOI, which is next
Depósito Legal in other BaOI fields
It is clear when the DL field was added and this graph confirms suspicions of the previous graph.
Depósito Legal as catalog number
Some people mistake the DL for a catalog number, but luckily not many:Depósito Legal in the Notes field
Some people add the DL to the "Notes" field, instead of to BaOI. My scripts search for references to DL there as well, but without verifying if they are false positives. Quite often they are, but there are still plenty of releases where they are true positives. DL in the "Notes" section are distributed over Discogs like this:I am sure there are other interesting statistics that can be derived from this, but I will leave that for another time.
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