Step 5.3
Contents
Step 5.3: Authority Change Reports
MARS 2.0 only generates authority change reports during the Notification or Current Cataloging services (see Step 6).
Authority change reports provide update information to:
- Select and download new authorities from an external source
- Manually edit authority records
- Edit out-of-date headings in bibliographic records
- Keep up with changes in the form of authorized headings
Authority change reports provide side-by-side views of national authority records which have been updated. The out-of-date form of the record is shown on the left and the updated record is shown on the right.
Changed, deleted, and newly added fields are highlighted within each change report. However, 005 fields are never highlighted as the 005 field will have been changed in every case during an update.
As with the bibliographic reports, authority change reports are in HTML format and can be viewed by any standard browser.
Changes in reports
The best strategy for most institutions is to receive all changes within the authority change reports.
If any byte within an authority record has changed due to updates from the national agency, that record will be included as part of the set of change reports returned. This includes changes in punctuation, diacritics, and indicators.
Significant authority changes
One way to reduce the number of updated authorities to review is to limit the changes to those with significant changes. A significant change is one in which certain fields (e.g., 010, 1XX, 4XX) experienced an update or change of some sort.
If you limit the change reports to only showing significant changes, then this greatly reduces the volume of records that are displayed within the reports.
This option allows your staff to review changed authorities based on criteria that you consider to be significant.
Insignificant authority changes
Another way to reduce the number of updated authorities to review within the change reports is to exclude insignificant changes. An insignificant change is where an indicator updates or there is a punctuation or diacritic fix within the field.
This is especially useful in reducing the sheer volume of authorities where the 2nd indicator is changed from 0 to blank, but that represents the only change made to the entire authority record.
Even if you choose to exclude insignificant changes from the reports, the authorities for those insignificant changes will still be delivered.
The authority change report can also be limited to only show certain fields such as 010 and 1XX.
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