RE: Authority Work Implications

["Martha Rice sanders" <msanders at postoffice dot providence dot edu>]

Stephen,

The answer to your question depends on whether or not you have automated
authority processing.  Your reference to overnight flipping of headings
leads me to believe that you do.  I'll answer, according to my experience,
based on that assumption.  

I assist with the authority work for the Helin consortium of several college
and university libraries in Rhode Island.  Several years ago we changed our
authority control vendor to OCLC MARS.  Because we wanted our authority
records to have the same system of control numbers in the 001 field, we
decided to wipe out all our former authority records and then load the new
ones the next day.  This is similar to what you will be doing.

We have the automated authority control module, which adds the following
reports:
      	   U > Bibliographic UPDATES
               N > NEAR matches
               L > BUSY matches
               X > Non-Unique 4XXs
               Y > Cross-Thesaurus Matches

We had sent our file of authority records to MARS rather than the
bibliographic file, so we had a lot of entries in the above files based on
loading the new authority records.  This was because headings is some of our
older bibliographic records matched 4xx fields in the new authority records.

I would guess that, because you sent your *bibliographic* file to OCLC for
processing, there should not be too great an effect on your headings
reports, with one exception.  The headings in your bibliographic records
should ALREADY contain the correct headings corresponding to your authority
records and not need to be flipped.  The one exception may be the 'near
matches' report. 'and' and '&' are normalized as the same thing in the
indexes (as are other symbols) so authority records that contain one in the
1xx and the other in the 4xx can fill the 'near matches' file.  This is true
in the character-based version.  I'm not yet expert at processing the
headings reports in Millennium, and this problem may not exist there.

We do monthly loads of corrected bibliographic records and associated
authority records.  These loads only fill the files to a great extent if
there has been a major change in a heading, such as changing Afro-American
to African American.

It's rather scary to totally wipe out and replace one's authority file (we
called it our day of 'unprotected cataloging'), but we found the results to
be very satisfactory.  I hope things go well for you!

--Martha
 
Martha Rice Sanders
Catalog Librarian & Coord. of Collections Services
Phillips Memorial Library
Providence College
Providence, RI 02918
401-865-1996
401-865-2823 (fax)
msanders at providence dot edu
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen McLaughlin [mailto:sMcLaughlin at sfpl dot org]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 12:49 PM
> To: IUG INNOPAC List
> Subject: Authoriy Work Implications?
> 
> I'm about to do a massive replacement of authority records, and I want
> to make sure I understand all the potential side-effects. Here's what's
> on tap:
> 
> In our previous (DRA) system, there was one authority file, so only one
> name authority record was needed, since it served as both a name and a
> subject-name authority. When we migrated to Innovative, we were unable
> to distinguish pure name authorities from name + subject authorities, so
> we dumped ALL the name authorities in with the subject authorities.
> 
> This, of course, hugely bloated our subject authority file, so we sent
> our entire bibliographic database off to OCLC for MARS authority
> processing. They updated the bib records (which have been loaded already
> into the database, overlaying the original versions) and sent us files
> with the appropriate name and subject authority records. Now I need to
> swap out the new authorities for the old ones.
> 
> I have devised a somewhat complex process that is intended to preserve
> certain local headings, as well as authorities loaded since the bib
> extract (now several months ago - there was a lot of clean-up after the
> loading of the bib records, but we won't go into that right now!).
> Because I don't want to fill up the bibtemp file, I will be loading the
> authority records in smallish batches (probably about 50,000 per day is
> the maximum, based on past experience). What worries me is this: Will
> there be any sort of an impact on the overnight headings reports (and
> consequently on system performance) from dumping 50,000 authority
> records a day over several days into the database? I'm afraid I do not
> have a good grasp of how the headings reports work, when flipping of
> headings in bib records is invoked by a new authority record, and so
> forth, to understand the possible side-effects of loading so many
> authority records into the database.
> 
> I would be very grateful for any advice, warnings, suggestions, horror
> stories or tales with happy endings that may help guide me as I work my
> way through what promises to be a highly, um, entertaining experience!
> 
> Many thanks!
> 
> Steve McLaughlin
> San Francisco Public Library
> smclaughlin at sfpl dot org
> 
>