Thanks to all responders for your suggestions.  We do use the III automated Authority Control Processing, but as as far as I can tell it doesn't eliminate the need to go through the BSLW reports to identify the added death dates and such that need to be updated manually.

The latest BSLW newsletter announces an enhancement survey *and* discusses the capabilities of the Backstage Automated Rules Engine.  Perhaps the awesome capabilities of BARE could be applied to eliminating the barely-changed authorities from reports.  My staff really doesn't like getting those reports from me to work on.
Ted Waller
Carlyle Campbell Library
Meredith College
Raleigh, N.C.


Martha Sanders wrote:
Ted,

I feel your pain!  One piece of III software that might help you is Automated Authority Control Processing which III can turn on for you if you don't yet have it activated.  It takes newly added and changed authority records and runs them overnight against the bibliographic database, changing the bib. records to match the changed authority records.  This generates Headings Reports, including: The first one contains a listing of each heading changed.  It's not fool-proof, but this is so much more effective that globally updating each one.  It doesn't, however, help with death dates because no 4xx is added by LC to the authority record for the old (still alive) version of the name unless you choose BSLW's custom programming to do this.

I did a presentation at the last IUG with two friends on III authority control, which you will find on the IUG website:

http://innovativeusers.org/programpages/IUG2008/i1

Your institution will need to be a member of the Innovative Users Group to open the presentation.  Let me know if you can.

--Martha

Martha Rice Sanders
Knowledge Management Librarian,
The HELIN Consortium
401-874-4951
msanders@etal.uri.edu

At 03:18 PM 7/29/2008, Ted Waller wrote:
Has anyone developed/discovered any techniques to speed up cleanup for the quarterly authority updates from BSLW?  We get a list of 6,000 changed headings each quarter that have to be reviewed after loading the changed MARC authority records.  Our III system replaces the changed authority records but we have to change the  headings in bib records manually.  There's no way to automate the process (Global Update for individual headings helps a little), but is there a way to speed up the review of headings in the reports?  The vast majority of headings don't require updates, as we know, but I would like a way to quickly zero in on those that do, like the headings where a death date is added.  It's frustrating to have to review 6,000 headings when only 150 bib. records need changing.

In other words, I am looking for a way to quickly identify the few changed authorities that also have headings in our bib. records that need to be changed.

I refer to the updates as quarterly, but others may get them more or less frequently.
--
Ted Waller
Carlyle Campbell Library
Meredith College
Raleigh, N.C.
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