Koha Question of the Week: How Can I Identify Unused Authorities?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Apr 7, 2023

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: How Can I Identify Unused Authorities?

Answer: If you'd like to do some authorities clean-up and want to start with identifying authorities with no bibliographic records attached to them, there's a plugin for that: the Unused Authorities Report plugin.

Once it is installed under Administration -> Manage Plugins, you can run the plugin.

You will have options for whether to output the results to your screen or a .csv file, and you can search specific authority types. Displaying results to the screen will provide a direct link back to the authority record, though the csv output will provide enough information to search for the records via the authorities module if you want to make an initial sweep and come back to investigate later. The plugin recommends searching no more than 5000 records at a time, so it may be a large undertaking for a large consortium with a lot of authorities, but it is a good housekeeping starting point, especially before utilizing a third-party service for authority clean-up.

Additional Resources

Authorities Reports in the Reports Wiki

Town Hall: Making Authorities Work for Your Library