Authority Reports | Subfield usage | Headings flip candidates

The authority reports are designed to function in a way similar to the NOTIS New Headings List but with some notable differences. Below are outlined some of the aspects of how the report functions; these explanations are not technical specifications of the how the report works, but are summaries provided so that it may be better understood how the report may be put to the best use.

The reports are listed in reverse chronological order and follow the standard three-letter abbreviations for the libraries as established in our Symphony system (see Abbreviation Table for list).

The reports are generated on a weekly basis by staff in the Bloomington Technical Services Database Management unit. They are not part of the production report schedule in Unicorn and problems with the reports should be addressed to Spencer Anspach or other staff in the Bloomington Technical Services department, not through the UITS helpdesk.

Similarities to the NOTIS NHL:

Differences from the NOTIS NHL:

Record/Heading Processing:

Report Generation:

Sections of the Report:

A note about sorting: Sorting is done in strict ASCII order. That means that spaces file first, then capital letters, then most punctuation, then lower-case letters. This will be especially evident in the Series section.


Authority Reports | Subfield usage | Headings flip candidates

The subfield usage report differs from the authority report in that subfields are listed for all bibliographic records added during the week. This report is not limited to just the subject headings which have the "|?UNAUTHORIZED" subfield.

The report is in at most three sections, LC, MESH, KINSEY, based on second indicator of the 6XX field (although not all three sections will be present in every batch of records). Only subfields v,x,y,z are included.

The report substitutes " x " for "|x", etc. for legibility. Each subfield is listed separately except for cases of multiple consecutive subfields z, which are kept together.

Each entry is followed in parentheses by the number of occurrences found in the batch of records. If the number is 25 or lower, the following line lists the unique title control numbers where those entries are found. Note that the number of titles may be significantly lower than the number of occurrences, as it is quite common for the same subfield to be used multiple times on a single record.


Authority Reports | Subfield usage | Headings flip candidates

The Headings flip candidates report lists headings which are likely to be changed in a machine-processing (automated authority control) environment. For each entry, the authority ID of the controlling authority record is listed, along with the authorized term (1XX entry) and the improper term (4XX entry). This is followed by the title control number, bibliographic entry, and proposed new entry (or multiples of these, if there are more than one bibliographic record with the same heading in the batch of records being processed).

This report represents headings (or parts of headings) on bibliographic records which exactly match a cross-reference on an authority record. Only 4XX fields, not 5XX fields, on authority records are considered. For 6XX fields, only the controlling thesaurus is used (e.g. MESH cross-references are used only to flip MESH entries, etc.).

All bibliographic entries under authority control are considered for this report. This means that every bibliographic entry listed will end with either the "|?UNAUTHORIZED" subfield or an authority linking subfield in the form "|=^A999" where 999 represents a number which matches the internal key for an authority record. Note that this means authorized, as well as unauthorized, headings are evaluated for possible flipping based on authority cross-references.

Note that the flip may cause the new entry to have more, or fewer, subfields. However, only the matched portion is replaced, so trailing subfields would be left in place (although they may no longer be correct, e.g. may no longer be authorized for geographic subdivision, etc.).

Please note that, like the other authority reports, this is intended to point to potential problems. This does not report on changes actually made, although these are the types of changes which may be considered for automated authority processing at some point in the future.


Last modified: Friday, March 20, 2009
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~catcong/nhl/explain.html
Comments: libtechs@indiana.edu
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