Hello,
George brings up good points. My current system does identify if an
authority record was created by a human or the system. Also we do end
up having to keep an eye on our authority records to do clean up when
necessary to cut down on any noise. Since our alphabetical searching
is based on mostly authority record data (author, subject, etc), it is
in our best interest in our old ILS to keep an eye on our records. I
guess that for the most part the EG OPAC does it searching and
faceting by only looking at that originated in the bib records and not
in data found in authority records? Is this correct?
Thanks in advance,
Yamil
On Sep 30, 2011, at 9:33 AM, Duimovich, George wrote:
Sounds good - I know other systems have had this functionality.
Big caveat, I think, is that any support for this functionality
should come with a way of identifying "system generated" authority
files distinct from the "official" ones. This would permit better
reporting and additional automated actions against these records and/
or for cataloguers to be able to better identify, review and then
"officialize" them by changing the 'automated' flag after any
updates/review.
Our situation is that somewhere a long time ago (DRA / MultiLIS
days??), our Unicorn-based records were in a system that had this
feature alongside, I believe, an automated keyword generating
feature. So we ended up with this HUGE authority list but the
majority of them were questionable (generated from automated "650"
keywords). I speculate that someone turned the feature on, and there
wasn't any follow-up. So years later, we're left wondering if
there's any "good stuff" in the authority records without LC control
numbers, etc. but not having any apparent "hook" into easily
determining which ones were cataloguer created vs. those created by
the ILS's auto-authority making function.
George
George Duimovich
NRCan Library / Bibliothèque de RNCan
