Rose, by any other name:

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Helen WilliamsAssistant Librarian, Cataloguing

• Rose, by any other name
• A workshop on name authority control
• CILIP
• Oct 2009

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(and the impact on current authority control
procedures)
Retrospective authority control
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Background

• LSE library founded 1896
• First subject catalogues appeared 1931-32
• Library houses over 4 million printed volumes
  (including journals, historical pamphlets,
  archive materials).
• Authority control procedures had been varied over
  the years
• Result library catalogue with a number of
  variant headings

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Initial considerations

• Authority control group convened in 2006
• Assessed user needs
• Created authority control guidelines for staff
  covering names, corporate names, subjects and
  series
• Analysed current position
• And possible options for improvement

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Detailed considerations

• In-house
• Estimated at 21,000 person hours based on an
  average of 2 minutes to check each heading
  equivalent of one person working on the project
  for 12 years!
• Outsourcing
• Export entire catalogue to external company to do
  one off check of names, corporate names, subjects
  and series. Headings are checked, validated
  against LC, alternations made, file returned and
  loaded back.
• Recommend regular checks of new records after
  project and accompanying error reports to assess
  future possibilities for in-house work.

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Tendering process (1)

• Outlined background and scope
• Requirements for project
• Responses required from tenderers

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Tendering process (2)

• Tenders were received from 3 companies
• Considered by working group
• Project awarded to Marcive

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Preparation for exporting file to Marcive

• Detailed specifications completed in-house to
  send to Marcive
• Liaison with Marcive
• In-house preparation and planning

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Exporting and test phase

• May 2007 exported approximately one million
  bibliographic records to Marcive
• 2 weeks later received test file of 10,000
  records as a sample for checking.
• Checked for corrected indicators/punctuation,
  1XX/7XX, 440/8XX, 6XX fields changed to correct
  authorities, 245 GMDs correctly replaced,
  abbreviations corrected, and that no general
  corruption of data had taken place

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Queries arising from sample checking

• We checked the test sample so thoroughly that we
  came up with a number of queries to be submitted
  to Marcive.
• Basic spellings not corrected eg Germay to
  Germany
• Names not recognised for correction where no
  space has been entered before the brackets eg
  Marks Spencer (Firm) changed to Marks Spencer
  Plc, but Marks Spencer(Firm) not changed.
• Department not changed to Dept. on names where
  that would then correct the authority. Eg
  Department of Employment to Dept. of Employment.
• Headings which needed a qualifier added and it
  was not eg Fabian Society needed (Great Britain)
  to validate
• Incorrect authority attribution eg Daunton M. J.
  (Martin James), 1949- was changed to Daunton,
  M.J. (Martin J.), 1949- even though the LC
  authority record does not include 1949.

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Marcive response

• Excellent response in terms of customer service
• Quick and detailed
• But it highlighted that we had higher
  expectations of the automated process than was
  actually achievable
• How we dealt with this

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Return of cleaned data

• A few weeks after checking the data and providing
  Marcive with written confirmation to go ahead we
  received 21 bibliographic files which comprised
  our entire catalogue and 10 files of authority
  records.
• IT dept had intended to load all files to the
  test server first, but took 7.5-9 hours per file
  and was therefore impractical.
• Decided to check 2 bib files and 1 authority file
  on test server but !

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Problems

• These projects are never as straight forward as
  one hopes!
• The test server indexes suffered under the strain
  of so much data and we had to wait for Ex Libris
  to carry out a regeneration of the indexes.
• Then we had a problem with Russian diactritics
  supplied by Marcive not being accepted by the
  character set validation on Voyager.
• Followed by a problem re-loading and re-indexing
  data in the live server. Even changing our
  in-house protocols the process still took 143
  hours!

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Ongoing services

• January 2008 and time to think about the ongoing
  services Marcive were providing for us.
• Overnight authorities service and
• Multimatches report
• Unrecognised main headings report
• Notification service
• Global headings change

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What is Global Headings Change?

• When a change is made to a 1XX field in an
  authority record then the change is sent to the
  GHC queue so that by using a particular command
  you can set off a database clean up so that all
  related bib records are also corrected.
• Overnight authorities service and
• Multimatches report
• Unrecognised main headings report
• Notification service
• Global headings change

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What is Global Headings Change?

• When a change is made to a 1XX field in an
  authority record then the change is sent to the
  GHC queue so that by using a particular command
  you can set off a database clean up so that all
  related bib records are also corrected.
• Overnight authorities service and
• Multimatches report
• Unrecognised main headings report
• Notification service
• Global headings change

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In-house considerations

• With these ongoing service we considered whether
  we no longer needed our stringent in-house
  authority validation checks at the cataloguing
  stage.
• On reflection we were confident that existing
  authority control guidelines needed to continue

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Follow-up to initial project

• In addition to embedding the ongoing services
  into our in-house work we needed to do some work
  to tidy up the headings Marcive had been unable
  to change.
• Scoped out work and employed a temp for 22 weeks
  working 4 days a week.

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Project work (1)

• Multiple reports returned from Marcive so had to
  establish order of priority which we based on
  user satisfaction levels.
• High unidentified subject headings and
  unrecognised geographic main headings, followed
  by in-house report of wrong or missing indicators
  

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Project work (2)

• Medium priority Personal names, corporate
  names, multimatches, geographic subdivisions
• Low priority Uniform titles, series headings,
  meeting names.

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Work completed

• Our temp spent around 630 hours working on the
  project and completed 37,514 records
• Approx one record per minute
• Estimate an average of 2 headings needed changing
  per record, so approx 75,000 headings were
  corrected.
• .

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Work remaining

• Remaining personal names
• Corporate names
• Multimatches (all fields)
• Remaining geographic subdivisions
• Series names
• Meeting names
• But more complex to deal with and would show
  lesser return for the time and cost involved.

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Pros and cons of more in-house work

• Advantages to completing the work accurate
  catalogue, minimal errors or confusing entries
• But, in reality, impossible for an institution
  with such an old catalogue to be completely free
  of errors.
• Sample testing shows that authority records are
  not available for over 90 of the remaining
  headings.
• Total time taken to complete medium priority
  reports alone would be 15,437 hours!
• Remaining headings are not considered high
  priority to aid user retrieval

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Thanks

• Due to those in the Bib Services team who took
  part in testing data
• The senior library assistant for overseeing the
  temp
• The support of our IT dept our IT contact has a
  cataloguing background so had an invaluable
  understanding of both the technical and practical
  aspects of the project.

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The results

• Our catalogue is more consistent and has less
  errors
• In-house services and ongoing Marcive services
  ensure that the benefits of this work are
  maintained
• The project has increased the profile of
  authority control in Bib Services
• Library catalogue continues to get a high score
  on student satisfaction survey