Wikipedia defines an oxymoron as “a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms.” In the title for this post, this is a turn of phrase that has represented at least one of the holy grails of research within our dept. We asked the question many times:

How can we automate what is essentially a manual review of our client’s headings?

We have 2 kinds of standard reports that are of concern here:

· R07 – unmatched primary headings

· R10 – heading matches multiple authority records

With R07 and R10, we have left the burden of researching these headings up to our clients. For some of you out there, that represents a tremendous number of headings to manually check on your own each time we deliver them to you.

Would it be helpful if your unmatched headings report also listed potentially valid headings? Maybe there was a typo in your original heading which caused it to not find a match. Or maybe your name heading is generic and lacking qualifiers. Or perhaps your heading matched two different authorities—but which two authority headings exactly?

Our team is currently working very hard on a potential near-match report which we hope to unveil within the next few weeks. We are anticipating replacing the current R07 and R10 reports with this new near-match report as part of our standard offering.

Here are a few examples of the report (from our latest build):

bib rec id no	700 1_	$a Miller, Stephen H.
nb2001044979	100 10	$a Miller, Stephen H., $d 1956-
n 83184733	100 1_	$a Miller, Stephen H. $q (Stephen Henry), $d 1943-

bib rec id no	700 1_	$a Cheung, Julian.
no2011144486	400 1_	$a Cheung, Julian Chi Lam, $d 1971-
nb 99009824	100 10	$a Cheung, Juanita

bib rec id no	100 1_	$a Kirk, Erika.
no2003097342	100 1_	$a Kirk, Erica.
no2001034074	100 1_	$a Kirk, Erin.

This revision of our fundamental reports doesn’t quite fulfill that automated manual review goal we still have. But we hope it puts our feet on the right path and helps to make your workload easier at the same time. We will have more information about this new report in the near future.

Nate Cothran - nate@bslw.com

Product Manager, Automation

Backstage Library Works

533 E 1860 S, Provo UT 84606

(p) 801.342.5697 - (f) 801.356.8220