[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen 2.2 and Authorities

[Elizabeth McLean]

Does anyone use Vandelay to import and overlay existing authority records? We are able to import new records, but cannot overlay existing authority records. I haven't been able to find documentation that says Evergreen specifically supports overlay of existing authority records, and if so, what field is used for the overlay-merge point. We are on release 2.1.

Thank you,

Libby McLean
Cataloging Librarian II
King County Library System
lmclean at kcls.org

-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Mary Llewellyn
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 6:38 AM
To: 'Evergreen Discussion Group'
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen 2.2 and Authorities

Hi George,

Thanks for the linking-script information. I don't work much on the database side, aside from running a few SQL queries, so this is good to know. I'll talk to our systems guy about it. 

As to the placeholder records, what I'm proposing is that the headings in 1xx, 6xx, 7xx, and 8xx be treated as quasi-authorized and generate brief acq records. You're right, there would have to be a mechanism for merging/overlaying those records when the full ones become available. Other systems can do it. I'd like to see Evergreen develop in that direction.

The workflow as I would prefer is for us to do quarterly extracts of the newest bib records added or updated during the previous 3 months. We  send that to our authority control vendor, who returns them to us with authorized headings in the bibs and full auth records that correspond to the headings.
We load those back to our database, replacing/merging/overlaying the bibs and doing the same to existing brief auth records that had been system-generated previously. Also, the vendor would provide us with auth files for changed headings, and we would load those to replace/merge/overlay previously loaded authority records. 

Mary


-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Duimovich, George
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 5:47 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen 2.2 and Authorities


Not sure how fully this would address your needs, but there is an auto-linking script that ships in the /support-scripts/ directory called "authority_control_fields.pl" - It can be used to populate your authority linking table and can be re-run following any significant imports to your authority entries (but re-running against entire database can take time).

We've taken the approach to automate this script on a weekly and/or monthly "cron-job" by re-running the above script against only new or modified bib records for that specified period. But we have already outsourced the creation / validation of our authority records from our bib data (so we're not adding any large batches of *new* authorities to match against).

Re: placeholder records: you make a good point regarding browse authority searching excluding non-authorized entries. On the one hand, it is intended to permit the browsing of authorized entries (say, authors) and it does that. But I can see how folks may want this new functionality more generalizable (e.g. browse index functionality - all entries vs. just browsing authorized entries, etc.). I'm also wondering whether the use of placeholder records will be creating more work later on (merging, overlaying, etc.) for the benefit of making the authority index browse more like a browse all entries index?  

George

George Duimovich
NRCan Library / Bibliothèque de RNCan





-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Mary Llewellyn
Sent: February 7, 2012 16:25
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen 2.2 and Authorities

Hi all,

Today I turned my attention to testing the new Authorities browse searching in Evergreen 2.2. I loaded some auth records through Vandelay and was able to search them in the browse search. But I'm uncertain about linking auth records to bibs; I see how to do it manually, but I'm hoping there's a way to have bibs link to auths as they are loaded, since it's not humanly possible to link manually link all the bibs with their respective auth records. Have I missed something, or is this still in development?

What would be nice is if the 1XX, 6xx, 7xx, and 8xx headings in the bib record would create placeholder auth records for headings as the bibs are loaded, which could be replaced/overlaid later with a load of full auth records from a vendor such as Backstage Library Works. 
Otherwise, we'll have a lot of records not retrievable with those browse searches because their full auth records aren't in the system yet. We'd never be caught up.

Thanks,

Mary


Mary Llewellyn
Database Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
Middlebury, CT
mllewell at biblio.org