Authorities

Get there: More > Administration > Global system preferences > Authorities

General

AuthDisplayHierarchy

Asks: ___ broader term/narrower term hierarchies when viewing authorities.

Default: Don’t show

Values:

  • Don’t show

  • Show

Description:

  • When set to ‘Show’ broader and narrower ‘See also’ references will be displayed in a tree at the top of the record in both the staff interface and the OPAC.

    In the authority record detail page in the staff interface, the broader and narrower terms are displayed in a tree

  • For MARC21, in order for this display to appear, the records must have 5XX with the relationship code in $w and the authority number (authid) in $9.

    Note

    The relationship codes in $w can be found on the Library of Congress website under Tracings and references-General information

    g - Broader term

    h - Narrower term

    For example, the records in the above screenshot have the following information:

    Authority #3
    001  3
    151  $a Germany
    551  $w h
         $a Baden-Württemberg (Germany)
         $9 4
    
    Authority #4
    001  4
    151  $a Baden-Württemberg (Germany)
    551  $w g
         $a Germany
         $9 3
    551  $w h
         $a Konstanz (Germany)
         $9 5
    
    Authority #5
    001  5
    151  $a Konstanz (Germany)
    551  $w g
         $a Baden-Württemberg (Germany)
         $9 4
    

    Warning

    The relationships must be bidirectional, meaning the broader term must reference the narrower term and the narrower term must reference the broader term.

AuthorityControlledIndicators

Asks: Use the following text to edit how authority records control indicators of attached biblio fields (and possibly subfield $2). Lines starting with a comment symbol (#) are skipped. Each line should be of the form: (marc21|unimarc), tag, ind1:(auth1|auth2|some_value), ind2:(auth1|auth2|thesaurus|some_value). Here auth1 and auth2 refer to the indicators of the authority record, tag is a biblio field number or an asterisk (*), and some_value is a fixed value (one character). The MARC21 option thesaurus refers to indicators controlled by authority field 008/11 and 040$f.

Description:

  • Used when merging authorities.

  • Controls how the indicators of linked authority records affect the corresponding biblio indicators. Currently, the default value is fine-tuned for MARC21 and copies the authority indicators for UNIMARC.

  • For example, a MARC21 field 100 in a biblio record should pick its first indicator from the linked authority record. The second indicator is not controlled by the authority. This report supports such MARC conventions.

AuthorityMergeLimit

Asks: When modifying an authority record, do not update attached bibliographic records if the number exceeds ___ records. (Above this limit, the merge_authority cron job will update them.)

Default: 50

Description:

  • This system preference determines the maximum number of bibliographic records that can be updated when an authority record changes.

  • This helps prevent overusing resources if an authority record is linked to many bibliographic records.

  • Make sure to enable the merge_authority cron job to catch the updates that wouldn’t otherwise be transferred to bibliographic records.

AuthorityMergeMode

Default: loose

Asks: When updating biblio records from an attached authority record (“merging”), handle subfields of relevant biblio record fields in ___ mode. In strict mode subfields that are not found in the authority record, are deleted. Loose mode will keep them. Loose mode is the historical behavior and still the default.

Values:

  • loose

  • strict

AutoCreateAuthorities

Asks: When editing records, ___ authority records that are missing.

Default: don’t generate

Values:

  • don’t generate

  • generate

Description:

  • This system preference allows you to decide if Koha automatically creates new authority records from the bibliographic records.

Warning

RequireChoosingExistingAuthority must be set to “don’t require”, otherwise this system preference has no effect.

  • If this is set to “don’t generate”, and catalogers enter uncontrolled terms in controlled fields, Koha will not generate matching authority records.

  • If set to “generate” (and RequireChoosingExistingAuthority is set to “don’t require”), Koha will automatically create authority records for headings that don’t have any authority link when saving a bibliographic record.

GenerateAuthorityField667

Asks: Use the following text as default value for the 667$a field of MARC21 authority records: ___

Default: Machine generated authority record

Description:

Note

This system preference is only used when marcflavour is set to MARC21.

GenerateAuthorityField670

Asks: Use the following text as default value for the 670$a field of MARC21 authority records: ___

Default: Work cat.

Description:

Note

This system preference is only used when marcflavour is set to MARC21.

MARCAuthorityControlField008

Default: || aca||aabn | a|a d

Asks: Use the following text for the contents of MARC21 authority control field 008 position 06-39 (fixed length data elements).

Important

Do not include the date (position 00-05) in this preference, Koha will calculate automatically and put that in before the values in this preference.

Description:

  • This preference controls the default value in the 008 field on Authority records. It does not effect bibliographic records.

RequireChoosingExistingAuthority

Asks: When editing records, ___ catalogers to reference existing authorities.

Default: don’t require

Values:

  • don’t require

  • require

Description:

  • This system preference determines whether or not catalogers can type into authority controlled fields.

  • If set to “don’t require”, catalogers can manually enter uncontrolled terms into controlled fields

  • If set to “require”, authority controlled fields will be locked, forcing catalogers to search for an authority.

  • If set to “require”, it will block AutoCreateAuthorities. Authorities will have to be catalogued manually (or imported).

UNIMARCAuthorityField100

Default: afrey50 ba0

Asks: Use the following text for the contents of UNIMARC authority field 100 position 08-35 (fixed length data elements).

Important

Do not include the date (position 00-07) in this preference, Koha will calculate automatically and put that in before the values in this preference.

Description:

  • This preference controls the default value in the 100 field on Authority records cataloged in UNIMARC. It does not effect bibliographic records.

UseAuthoritiesForTracings

Default: Don’t use

Asks: ___ authority record numbers instead of text strings for searches from subject tracings.

Values:

  • Don’t use

    • Search links look for subject/author keywords (example: opac-search.pl?q=su:Business%20networks)

  • Use

    • Search links look for an authority record (example: opac-search.pl?q=an:354)

Description:

  • For libraries that have authority files, they may want to make it so that when a link to an authorized subject or author is clicked on the OPAC or staff client it takes the searcher only to a list of results with that authority record. Most libraries do not have complete authority files and so setting this preference to ‘Don’t use’ will allow searchers to click on links to authors and subject headings and perform a keyword search against those fields, finding all possible relevant results instead.

Linker

These preferences will control how Koha links bibliographic records to authority records. All bibliographic records added to Koha after these preferences are set will link automatically to authority records, for records added before these preferences are set there is a script (misc/link_bibs_to_authorities.pl) that your system administrator can run to link records together.

AutoLinkBiblios

Asks: ___ attempt to automatically link headings when saving records in the cataloging module.

Default: Don’t

Values:

  • Do

  • Don’t

Description:

  • This system preference determines whether or not Koha will attempt to link terms in authority controlled field to existing authority records upon saving a new bibliographic record.

  • This system preference is used when creating new bibliographic records. CatalogModuleRelink and LinkerRelink are used when editing bibliographic records.

  • If set to “Do”, Koha will search in the thesaurus to find a matching authority record. If it finds one, it will link it. If it finds more than one, LinkerModule will determine which one is linked.

  • If set to “Don’t”, no linking attempt will be made when saving a new bibliographic record.

LinkerConsiderThesaurus

Asks: ___ compare the source for 6XX headings to the thesaurus source for authority records when linking.

Default: Don’t

Values:

  • Don’t

  • Do

Description:

  • This system preference is used to enable multiple thesauri support for authorities.

    • The thesaurus used for the term is added to the authority record using 040$f.

    • In the bibliographic record, set the second indicator to 7 for 650 and add the source to 650$2. For local terms, use 4 (Source not specified) as the indicator.

      Example for a bibliographic record:

      650 _ 0 $a Feminism
      650 _ 7 $a Feminism $2 sao
      650 _ 7 $a Feminism $2 barn
      

      The first example above is the LCSH term. The other two terms are from sao (controlled Swedish subject heading system) and barn (Swedish children subject heading system). These three are using the same TOPIC_TERM Feminism, but they belong to different thesauri.

Warning

In existing systems, enabling this preference may require a reindex, and may generate new authority records if AutoCreateAuthorities is enabled.

Note

Support for multiple authority thesauri currently only works with ElasticSearch.

LinkerKeepStale

Default: Do not

Asks: ___ keep existing links to authority records for headings where the linker is unable to find a match.

Values:

  • Do

  • Do not

Description:

  • When set to ‘Do’, the linker will never remove a link to an authority record, though, depending on the value of LinkerRelink, it may change the link.

LinkerModule

Default: Default

Asks: Use the ___ linker module for matching headings to authority records.

Values:

  • Default

    • Retains Koha’s previous behavior of only creating links when there is an exact match to one and only one authority record; if the LinkerOptions preference is set to ‘broader_headings’, it will try to link headings to authority records for broader headings by removing subfields from the end of the heading

  • First match

    • Creates a link to the first authority record that matches a given heading, even if there is more than one authority record that matches

  • Last match

    • Creates a link to the last authority record that matches a given heading, even if there is more than one record that matches

Description:

  • This preference tells Koha which match to use when searching for authority matches when saving a record.

LinkerOptions

Asks: Set the following options for the authority linker ___

Important

This feature is experimental and shouldn’t be used in a production environment until further expanded upon.

Description:

  • This is a pipe separated (|) list of options. At the moment, the only option available is “broader_headings.” With this option set to “broader_headings”, the linker will try to match the following heading as follows:

    =600 10$aCamins-Esakov, Jared$xCoin collections$vCatalogs$vEarly works to 1800.
    

    First: Camins-Esakov, Jared–Coin collections–Catalogs–Early works to 1800

    Next: Camins-Esakov, Jared–Coin collections–Catalogs

    Next: Camins-Esakov, Jared–Coin collections

    Next: Camins-Esakov, Jared (matches! if a previous attempt had matched, it would not have tried this)