Monthly authorities processing - Overview

Summary: Info for all TS staff concerning Backstage Library Works automated authority control.

MSUL's process 

• Each month, typically on the first business day, new bibs from the previous month are collected and sent to Backstage for processing

  • Only bibs with a cat date from the selected month are harvested and sent

• Processed bibs are usually returned within a day and are loaded back into Inventory

• Existing bibs are overlaid with the newly updated bibs provided by Backstage
  • Any changes to bibs made by TS staff between collection and loading will be wiped out
  • In Sierra, TS Staff was asked to refrain from making certain changes during processing. Because the turnaround between collection and loading is much faster in FOLIO, this is no longer a concern.

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Backstage's process

Any bib records we send to Backstage receive the following upgrades:

• Headings updated and/or changed to match national authority records
  • The updated headings also include $0 URIs when available
• GMDs are removed from the 245 and moved to an added 500 note
• 33X content, media, and carrier fields added where not present, except for records created under DACS rules
• Abbreviations spelled out in the 300 field and elsewhere as appropriate
• Corrections made to the MARC coding (fixed fields, tags, indicators, subfield delimiters)

In addition, Backstage helps us keep our authority records up to date. Any new or updated authority records belonging to following categories are sent to us each month and loaded into the database.

• personal, corporate, and conference names (LCNAF)
• LC subjects and geographic place names (LCSH)
• LC genre/form terms (LCGFT)
• Nationally established series and uniform titles (LCNAF)
• Genre/form terms from other authorized vocabularies:
  • Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)
  • Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (TGM)
  • Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
  • Rare Book & Manuscript Section (RBMS) Controlled Vocabularies for:
    • Binding Terms
    • Genre Terms
    • Paper Terms
    • Printing & Publishing Evidence
    • Provenance Evidence
    • Type Evidence

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Project history

To implement ongoing automated authority control, Backstage first had to complete a retrospective update of ~7 million records in our database. 

• The extraction of these records began on May 20, 2016.
  • Any bib records created after May 20 were included in future groups of records sent to Backstage on a regular basis.
• Each record was given the upgrades listed above.
• Backstage also completely replaced our existing authority file with a newly updated and expanded file, drawn from headings in those ~7 million bib records.
  • The new authority file contained more than 2 million records. 
• Returned records were loaded over a period of weeks in Summer/Fall 2016.

The re-processing of all our bibliographic records occurred June 10-20, 2022, in preparation for the migration of our catalog to Folio. We also received a new authority file of 2,795,496 records.

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