Koha Community GiftED: Authorities

by Jessie Zairo on Dec 24, 2024

Koha Community GiftED: Authorities

When: January 21, 2025, 1:00 pm ET

Presenter: Ms. Heather Hernandez, Technical Services Librarian
San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Research Center

Presentation

Koha Community Gifted - Authorities

Question and Answer

Comment: Participate in Mattermost with the Koha Community.

Answer: If you are interested in joining mattermost, here is more information Koha Community Mattermost

Comment: Using the Did you mean feature can help patrons

Answer: You can enable this in Koha by navigating to Administration --> Did you mean? cgi-bin/koha/admin/didyoumean.pl

Question: where are these authority records coming from?

Answer: Library of Congress https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html (these can be retrieved from Koha’s Authority module

Question: How do you add these z39.50 targets or customize what they say?

Answer: Adding a z39.50 call as Heather referenced Koha Manual for Adding Z39.50 targets

Question: If you have 010 control numbers pointing to LC is it possible to pull in regular updates? So when they change terms we receive the changes?

Answer: Not currently, but there is a bug in the Koha Community. Bug 38956 - Automate MARC Authority Updates with the Library of Congress

Question: How important is it to get rid of machine-generated authorities if you have them?

Answer: This is a cataloger's decision to keep or bring in authorities from an outside trusted source.

Question: I also can't retrieve an LC heading when I try a control number search...wondering if this is a problem with our instance. I can find the heading with a keyword search so it exists.

Answer: Keyword searching works the best.

Comment: Thank you! So if you do see an updated heading, you can edit it and pull in an overlay from z39.50. I think I get it

Comment: We would LOVE to have a way to automatically update authorities.

Question: do you have suggestions for ignoring subfields when trying to match an authority a main heading? for example geographic subfield

Comment: FWIW we use machine generated and like it, we just don't have time to pull in headings for everything (especially bulk imports). I really do not like the experience of "did you mean..." linking to searches with no results. Just differing opinions.

Comment: Overlaying machine generated authorities can happen over time as you add new or edit bibliographic records. They don't have to be fixed all at once, they still function as links.

Question: If I have a subject authority of "cows" and you use MarcEdit to upload a record of "kows" if the subject authority has "kows" as a "use for" record, does it automatically correct the new record? How about if it doesn't have "kows" as a cross reference?

Answer: you would need to add the cross reference

Comment : It would be really neat to have an authority settings show-and-tell at a Cat SIG meeting!

Question: Could someone clarify what we mean by machine-derived authorities?

Comment: I would consider switching to machine-generated authorities if there were a way for the system to first check (and bring in) an LC heading. I feel like there might be a bug for that but I can't find it at the moment!

Comment: This Bug 11300 - Add a new authority linker which searches for authority links on a Z39.50 server. (

Comment: Looks amazing. You could look up an authority internally or pull from z39.50 while cataloging

Comment: If Z39.50 isn't working for your institution, it might be because the ports it uses are blocked by your IT department. Took a long time to figure that out.

Comment: koha-US SIG's https://koha-us.org/

Learn More

Koha Manual - Authority records are a way of controlling fields in your MARC records. Using authority records will control subject headings, personal names, and places.