Authority Control in the NZ

See Best Practices for Decision Pages and Tags for groups

Legend: NOT STARTED IN PROGRESS STALLED DECIDED

Recommendation

17 Jun 2024DRAFT:

Authority control has been one of the tested use cases for the Expanded https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1PGnl0MZFoYetq_W0seqk4QXEr_ZJ0uRI proposal.

If UC members wish to access the NZ Authority Control Task List, they may apply for an NZ Alma account through the standard process (NZ Deputy in the Alma NZ instance procedure/practice). The only required permission is Cataloger.

A recommended potential workflow:

• Filter as much as possible from within the Authority Control Task List (i.e., limit to one field and one vocabulary; limit to one week; remove CZ and suppressed records).

  

• To find records that your campus holds, you may export from the task list and use your IZ Analytics, an SRU tool, or other means to limit to records held by your institution. Example using Excel Alma lookup:

  

• Campus staff may then process entries in the list that require authority work.

Impact

Reasoning

Background

Relevant Ex Libris documentation:

• https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Materials/050Alma_FAQs/Metadata_Management/Authority_Control

• https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/Metadata_Management/060Working_with_Authority_Records

• https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/Metadata_Management/060Working_with_Authority_Records/010Using_the_Authority_Control_Task_List

Current relevant NZ configurations:

• The “Authorities - Handle Local Authority Record Updates” and “Authorities - Link BIB Headings” jobs are both enabled and run daily.

• However, the “Authorities - Preferred Term Correction” job is disabled, since it was determined to introduce too many errors. (See Harvard’s documentation for a list of issues).

The SILS Landscape

The implementation decision (RMFG (Go-live and beyond) Working with the NZ authority control tasklist ) had an ambitious plan to generate monthly spreadsheets based on the NZ Authority Control Task List. However, since the implementation of WorldCat Daily Updates, the scope of the Authority Control Task List (ACTL) has become too massive to even consider exporting them.

Example:

For a single week (10/09/2003-10/16/2023), there are 344,914 items in the ACTL.

Attempting to narrow the results down through the available filters can help, but the number of items is still overwhelming.

• Suppressed from Discovery - No

• Linked to Community Zone - No

The ACTL does not show any information about which campuses have holdings on a particular record--you must search for the MMS ID to see holdings.

The NZ ACTL can only be accessed through the NZ instance of Alma--individual campus IZs can only see a version of the ACTL for their records that are not linked to the NZ.

Analytics does not provide any of the information available in the ACTL.

Many campuses regularly perform authority work at the time of cataloging (e.g., creating an authority record for a name come across in daily work).

But the bulk of the database maintenance work (i.e., ensuring that legacy records continue to be updated with current forms of headings) has now mostly been abandoned, with the hope that our WorldCat Daily Updates will take care of it.

What is still desired?

• (UCLA): Since many of our records come in through vendor loads or are processed by student workers, we would like to be able to review headings for records recently cataloged in our collection that may have issues so we can address them. This was possible in our last system (Voyager) with the help of our authority vendor (Backstage Library Works). It does not appear to be possible in our current implementation of Alma.

Options Considered [remove if not needed]

Dependencies

Questions to consider

Action Log