As Alma GND User Group we represent staff users that are tasked with data management in the Integrated Authority File (GND), the most widely used authority file in the German speaking library community.
We would like Ex Libris to introduce an authorities search index that makes the content of MARC 21 Format for Authority Data field 885 available for search purposes.
As a QA measure several different algorithms are applied to the content of GND to find potential duplicate records and mark these candidates in field 885. In cases where the confidence value does not reach a certain threshold, the records are not merged automatically. Instead staff users check the involved records intellectually and decide whether to merge them or not. In order to find these potentially duplicate records, we need an index for field 885. Of course the index would not only be available for GND, but for other authority files as well.