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Reviewing Authorities

Every accession has an Authorities tab alongside the Items and Analysis tabs. This is where you review every authority the AI proposed across the accession's items.

Authorities tab

The layout​

Status filters on the left:

  • Needs review — the model wants your attention (low confidence, conflicting candidates, or no good match)
  • Unresolved — a candidate was proposed but not yet verified
  • Verified — humans have confirmed; permanent
  • All — everything in this accession

Entity filters below status:

  • All — every entity type
  • Persons — people mentioned (FAST / VIAF)
  • Places — geographic locations (TGN / GeoNames)
  • Organisations — institutions, companies, clubs (FAST / VIAF)
  • Subjects — topical subject headings (LCSH / FAST)

Noise control:

  • Hide single mentions — by default, entities that appear in only one item are hidden, because they're noisier signal. Untick to see them.

The header on each entity card shows the entity name, how many items it appears in, the entity type, and its current status.

Actions per entity​

ActionWhat it does
Link…Open a picker to select or change the authority record
Promote to localAdd the entity to your local vocabulary as a custom authority. Useful for org-specific entities not in any global vocab (a local club, a specific event).
Remove from accessionThe entity stops being linked to any item in this accession (the items themselves stay)

Bulk actions​

The top toolbar has two bulk shortcuts:

  • AI consolidate — when several variant spellings of the same entity exist ("Derby Co FC", "Derby County Football Club", "Derby County FC"), the model proposes merges. You approve / reject in a diff view.
  • Refresh — re-run authority resolution against the current state of the accession (e.g. after you've edited descriptions)

There's also a Bulk approve high-confidence option in the … menu — accepts every Unresolved entity above a confidence threshold in one click.

A practical workflow​

For most accessions, the efficient flow is:

  1. Open the Authorities tab. Note the totals — "Linked authorities — 26 verified · 39 unresolved · 10 vocab-bound fields" shows you what's already done and what's left.
  2. Click "Needs review" first. These are the ones the model isn't sure about. Decide for each.
  3. Run AI consolidate. Merge variant spellings.
  4. Use Bulk approve high-confidence for the easy ones in Unresolved.
  5. Walk through the rest by entity type. Persons first (most likely to be wrong), then organisations, then places, then subjects.

Allow about 15–30 minutes per accession for a thorough authority review. Less if the accession is short or homogeneous.

What the model gets right​

  • Well-known entities — major people, places, organisations with dense Wikipedia / VIAF coverage
  • Place names with clear context — when the document mentions a county or country, disambiguation is reliable
  • Subjects with strong LCSH matches — broad subject vocabularies

What it struggles with​

  • Local entities — the village football club, the parish council. Often no global authority exists — use Promote to local.
  • Homonyms without context — every "Smith" without other identifying clues
  • Historical place names — if the place has been renamed since, the model may resolve to the modern name (sometimes you want this; sometimes you don't)
  • Organisations that have changed name — the model usually picks the most recent name

Local vocabulary​

The Promote to local action adds an entity to your organisation's local vocabulary — Settings → Data Model → Local Vocabulary.

Local-vocabulary entries:

  • Get their own URI within your archive (archivers://your-org/people/joe-bloggs)
  • Are reusable across accessions
  • Can later be promoted to a global vocabulary (e.g. you contribute a record to Wikidata, then update your local entry to point at the new Wikidata URI)

Local-vocabulary entries are visible to your whole organisation on Team / Enterprise.

Exporting authorities​

Authorities flow into every export format that supports them:

  • EAD3 — <corpname authfilenumber="…" source="…"> style attributes
  • Dublin Core — dcterms:subject with rdf:resource URI
  • JSON — full URIs in nested objects
  • CSV — URI in a separate column alongside the label

Authorities not verified by humans still export — but EAD3 includes an audience="internal" flag so consumers can opt in to using them or fall back to verified ones only.

See also​