Authority Control Work | @Jeanette Kalchik @Kalli Mathios @Alissa Hafele @Sheila Torres-Blank @Mary Campany @Emily Semenoff | What are you currently doing? Stanford’s use case: overlay bibliographic records with updates to authorized headings, but also load authority records No current plans to link authority records to bibs at any real scale Hoped to not use Data Import at all for this process Tested out EBSCO migration tools and Python script, and also Source Record Batch Update and Change Manager Endpoints, but Data Import tests proved more successful than these other options Currently, all 500k bib records and 1 of 4m auth records have been loaded via Data Import Alissa batching these incrementally during off hours
What are the challenges you face? Encountering frequent errors and timeouts with these larger loads Error handling isn’t great--decoding error messages can be tough How to handle deletes via the UI? No overrides of field protections available for authority records; this is problematic for a protected local field Stanford uses to facilitate workflows Compiled issues from Stanford’s analysis of MARC authorities loads and processes:
Updates from other institutions loading authority records Sheila Torres-Blank for Texas State – difficulty matching on 010 in authority records, can’t get this working despite the fact that it is supposed be operational Jennifer Eustis for UMass/Five Colleges – not going to use MARC authorities, just sending bibs out for processing and loading them back in Katie Rahman for [institution] Lola Estelle, migration consultant from EBSCO – working with Notre Dame on migration No automated batch linking possible until maybe Umbrellaleaf Temporary workaround will use repeated Backstage processing loads, and then attempt wholesale linking when the functionality is available What are others planning? Stanford still busy with initial phases, no plans yet for automatic batch linking; Nancy Lorimer has thought some about partial matches to subject strings, tracking these in the system, but no action can be taken yet Lisa Lorenzo, MSU: Big roadblock is outstanding question about subdivisions in headings and how that will affect linking logic
Question for Khalilah: is there a SIG or user group for MARC authorities? Previously, activity was conducted within the QuickMarc group; development had to slowed down in favor of more urgent priorities Khalilah hopes that MARC Authorities work will pick back up again with Umbrellaleaf Clearly batch automatic linking is the number one need expressed in this discussion Perhaps there is a case to make for a separate module that is solely devoted to managing linking, rather than trying to administer this via Data Import (obviously this would require resources which aren’t guaranteed) Shared a slide deck that outlines potential next steps for MARC Authorities batch linking
Tom Hanstra from Notre Dame: Aleph does have a tool that runs as a background process to handle authorities linking Jennifer, UMass/Five Colleges Khalilah There is no current roadmap for Authorities beyond Umbrellaleaf Batch linking and refinements to authority files are on the docket for Umbrellaleaf Vetch – could be some carryover work from batch development in Umbrellaleaf
Spreadsheet to track top priorities, use cases, and ideas for enhancements. | | |