The Five College Record Merge Working Group submitted its Recommendations report to FIT and FCLC in June of this year. If you remember, the charge of this working group has multiple phases. The first was to create a recommendations document on how to merge bibliographic records in preparation for the migration to a single tenant FOLIO. The second phase is to act on those recommendations to deduplicate bibliographic records.
FCLC endorsed the decision to use Backstage Library Works (BSLW) as our vendor to help us deduplicate bibliographic records within the scope of the record merge. Because of the number of bibliographic records involved, approximately 5 million, FIT and FCLC have decided to forgo authority control loads until this can be handled by FOLIO. The entire file will be reset at that time.
The group has a number of items to address in these early stages to prepare for deduplicating bibliographic records. We will be working with BSLW on refining the contract, timeline of events, algorithm used for deduplication, and testing samples. The working group is also beginning to work on a testing procedure and mapping document.