• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
I ran p_auth_04 on our database and it identified records which had possible ambiguous headings. It also identified some records which were actually duplicates of one another.

Some spot checking shows that the result of p_auth_04 looks to be more often records which truly do need to be "disambiguated" more than duplicate records. is there another way to determine what records in the database really have a strong likelihood of being duplicates of each other so that we might weed out such records manually?

Resolution:
p-auth-04 is the standard report that libraries use to located duplicate records. p-auth-14 is another report under Catalog Maintenance Reports in the authority library that can help identify duplicate records. Your catalogers should also try running these maintenance reports against specific indexes.

It's very unlikely that matching headings in the personal name index, for example, would have legitimate matching headings. These are most likely duplicate records, rather than matching headings that need to be disambiguated.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013