Currently, Alma requires quite a bit of manual intervention when creating local authority records and linking them to the relevant records in the catalog. In order to relink an authority controlled field (ie. 1XX, 6XX, and 7XX) someone from the library must go through and change the second indicators from 0 to 7 and add a $2 with the local authority profile code. This can be done using normalization rules but it still must be done manually. There are no scheduled jobs that will do this.

An example might be helpful to both show the problem and a possible solution.

We have decided to change the LCSH "Indians of North America" to Indigenous peoples of North America". We moved the authorized heading "Indians of North America" to a 450 field in the local authority record and put "Indigenous peoples of North America in the 150 field. The issue we ran into was that the Authorities-Link BIB Headings job will only relink the LCSH headings in records if we change the second indicator to 7 and add a $2 with the local authority profile code. Then the Authorities-Link BIB Heading job will relink the headings and send it to the Authorities-Preferred Term Correction job to switch out the LCSH with the new local preferred term.

It would be helpful if Alma would match to local authorities (both preferred term and related terms) in the Authorities-Link BIB Headings job and then change the second indicator to 7 and add the $2 with the appropriate local authority profile code automatically. This would remove the manual process with normalization rules needed in the current workflow to make local authorities work. This would also make the scaling and sustainability of local authorities possible. Since we currently rely on normalization rules in import profiles to change the second indicator and add $2 with the appropriate code the import process will get slower and slower as more local authorities are implemented.