Background from email sent by Ryan on 3/3/2009:

Hello catalogers,

We will be starting very soon a project to load all of UC Irvine’s authority records into our database.  UCI recently sent their entire bibliographic database to Backstage and received back authority records that matched headings in their bib records.  Since UCI has large record sets acquired by CDL and cataloged by SCP, we thought this would be a great opportunity to get these authority records for SCP cataloging into our own database and potentially clean-up headings in the SCP bib records before we send them to OCLC for reclamation.

Out of all of the UCI records, we cannot identify just the ones that apply to SCP records so we will be loading their entire file. If we already have the record in our database, it will be overlaid. Ones we don’t already have will be inserted and they will get a 910 field of “UCI Authority Load”. This is should be a very good thing. We have only sent our UCSD records for 2001-present to Backstage so we will be adding a large number of authority records that are applicable to UCSD that we never had before.

There will be, of course, authority records (known as blind references) that will not match any of our bib headings. After we load each of the many files, we will dump the blind references into a review file and globally suppress them by changing the “ASUPPRESS” code in the authority record to “y”.  We will not be deleting them at this time.  That’s because it could be a legitimate record for us—the bib heading doesn’t exactly match the 1xx or 4xx fields but the bib heading should be changed to the form in the 1xx. We expect that this will happen often with death dates and AACR2-compatible headings.

DBM will work on deleting the suppressed blind refs over time, but for now, please resist the temptation to delete any of them yourselves.

These statistics represent new, unsuppressed authority records added to our system:

In addition, we have 20,803 suppressed name authority records and 19,832 suppressed subject authority records. They all are for personal names. All series, title, and name/title authority records that were blind references were deleted and not suppressed.