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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Impact of Emory's provisional record policy for Sirsi and LTI project

I looked at the file "EMORY-AUP114.LCS" and found 304 authority records beginning:
"World War, 1914-1918" and 839 beginning "World War, 1939-1945".

However, there are only 3 authority records in the entire LC authority file which are subdivided by "United States" (e.g. "World War, 1914-1918|zUnited States...").  You received all 3.  The situation with "World War, 1939-1945, United States" is similar, with only 6 LC authority records, all of which were provided for Emory.   All of the above LC authorities contain the 667 note: "|aRecord generated for validation purposes." 

Though LC does not, in general, create authority records for "Authorized heading + float", a project begun several years ago did a pass through the bib file, creating authority records for full heading strings, including floats or subdivisions (e.g. geographic).  The above 667 field was added to each of these machine-generated authority records. 

In the absence of a national-level authority record, some local systems create authority records for the full subject heading string.  LTI's "provisional" option did this for the library's former Sirsi system, creating (hundreds of?) thousands of records with an "ltp" number in the 001.  Sorry, but I can't tell how many provisional records would have been created.  I can say that, in addition to "validated" heading strings (main + subdivision), the provisional records included all the unlinked headings, since they were based on "no national level authority record".  There were over 300,000 entries on the "unlinked headings" report generated by the AUP.  

FYI, as of 1/23, the numbers for the entire LC authority file were:
names: 8,316,971 -- lcsh: 406,712 -- kids: 897
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