RMFG (Go-live and beyond) Working with the NZ authority control tasklist

Legend: not started IN PROGRESS STALLED decided

Recommendation

For the remainder of Phase 4:

UC-wide Authority Control Tasklist reports will be generated monthly by CDL or other “NZ deputy” designated by CDL based on the reports generated in the Alma NZ and staged in a Google folder

    Naming Conventions

        allUCACT Linking Multiple matching AUT [MMYY]

        allUCACT PreferredTermCorrection Bib heading updated (mediated correction) [MMYY]

    Reports include:

• Change date

• Title

• Vocabulary

• Field

• Bib heading before

• Bib heading after (if applicable)

• Claimed campus

    Claiming bibs/headings:

• Add your campus initials to the master spreadsheet

• Assignments within a campus are local decisions and do not need to be recorded on the master spreadsheet

• Campuses are encouraged to help with authority control system-wide so long as they are able to do so within the current PCC guidelines. There is no obligation to work on the ACTL at all.

    Making corrections:

• Changes to NARs should be made in OCLC

• Campuses should generally create new authority records in OCLC, not in Alma

Reasoning

RMFG (and other succeeding policy groups) will need to review and revise the ACT workflow throughout the remainder of Phase 4 and beyond. Authority control in consortial Alma environments is complex and will require continued development. This policy is meant to allow staff to continue performing authority control while other policies and practices are developed.

The UCs are implementing “mediation” for preferred term correction for all LC vocabularies in the Alma NZ. This means that while Alma will run the jobs to identify terms that may need correction, the system will not actually change any headings. Instead, the report will provide a list of headings that campus catalogers can manually review

Background

Alma uses the LC Name Authority file and other established vocabularies to run automated authority control jobs in the system. While this type of control is valuable, RMFG identified several issues with how Alma finds matches and makes changes. RMFG consulted several consortia who confirmed our concerns and found that most of them disable the authority jobs altogether. RMFG and campus testing did find value in the reports that the system generates and so did not want to disable the jobs altogether because of that. Instead, we have decided to try “mediated” correction for some vocabularies. We will assess the utility of the reports and the workload for the next year.

Dependencies

Questions to consider

Action Log