Skip to Main Content

Name Authority Correction in UFDC: Special Problems When Searching in UFDC

Diacritics often do not print correctly on the Excel sheet. The easiest thing is to find the heading in the online LC Name Authority and copy and paste it in the search field. Put a note in the Notes column: “Name is _______________”. Search both with the diacritics and without them. Even doing all this there may still be problems, so try other approaches to unearthing headings that aren't showing up in the results.

Multi-Item records pose special challenges (especially those with dozens or hundreds of items), as the heading may be in one of the individual item’s records and not necessarily in the main record. This can happen with serials or with collections of papers or photos associated with an individual. Sometimes you can deduce which items are likely to have the heading, but often you have to make a decision on how much time to dedicate to finding the record(s). It is a good idea to open all the sub-records in multiple tabs (use CTRL-click to do so). This makes it easy to look at (and, if necessary, correct) a great many records without losing your place, even after signing out for the night. Once all the corrections are made you can refresh the original search results page to see what else may need attention.

Elsevier records for articles in journals often have corporate body headings that really only derive from the institutional affiliations of the author(s). Since these normally wouldn’t even be headings there is no reason to change them. Correct personal name headings as usual.

Ambiguous results (Is this the same person? Is this the same corporate body or has there been a name change?) can be clarified by another look at the info on the LC Name Authority website and sometimes also Wikipedia and/or Google searches. Again, good judgment should be used in order to avoid going down too time-consuming a rabbit hole.

Some headings should be skipped when it’s clear there are too many records or too many ambiguities to justify the time and energy that it would take (e.g., some very common personal names, corporate bodies where searches yield too many results), or when the LC Name Authority itself says a heading applies to more than one person and needs disambiguation. In these cases, put “Skipped” in the “Found the LC Heading? (Y/N)” column.

The Notes column is used to give some idea of special difficulties or other unique aspects associated with a heading or its associated records.

If there is no LC heading or there are problems with the LC heading, cross references are needed, etc., note all the information, and links on the "UFDC Name Authority Questions" document in the RTS Metadata Team part of Microsoft Teams.

University of Florida Home Page

This page uses Google Analytics - (Google Privacy Policy)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.