This is not an attempt to criticize the Catholic Church or the Popes. It is merely a data quality project. Please let me explain this further. Every catalogue record should have so-called “authorities”, these are bits in the record which are highly-controlled forms of a name or a subject; if we do our job properly they can act as links to other books relating to this name: the author of this book has written other books, or the subject of this book was identified in another.
If we are looking at books on Pope Leo I (died in 461 AD) one of the results on our catalogue is:
You can see that after the author’s name “Jalland, Trevor (Trevor Gervase)” and after the subject “Leo I, Pope -461” is a magnifying glass. This signposts that this is an authorized entry on our system, so has a controlled version of this name. So when you click on such an authorized field, it will present you with other books matching this authority, in the case of Leo I, or “St. Leo the Great”, this currently produces 9 results:
In the above example you can also see that without this authorized subject field of “Leo I, Pope -461”, someone searching our catalogue would need to do one search for Leo I Pope, and then one for “St. Leo the Great”, and maybe even “Saint Leo the Great”. Before I started work on Leo I, the top of the authorities list of results for him looked like:
When I clicked on the first entry, it looked as follows:
In case there was any doubt, it gives us basic information about Pope Leo I, who died in 461 AD. After me importing more detailed data, our local data now also includes different ways of referring to this pope:
Going back to our authorities overview, I have marked up the entry with the higher number of records linked to it (orange), and two further entries in here (blue arrows) which could be merged with the top entry:
After improving the first record and merging the 2 other authority entries, the authorities now look as follows:
You can also see that this overview now gives the variants of his name (also in other languages), which might help a cataloguer to discern whether a book mentioning “Leo, der Grosse” is Leo I. The merging has also added already 1 more result (now 10 books are linked to this authority), which means if you click on the link in the catalogue you will now find 10 (soon to be 11, when the other merger in the background has been done by Koha).
A search on the catalogue for ‘Leo the Great Pope’ returns other Pope Leos, and there are 33 results, see https://hey.koha.openfifth.net/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&q=%27Leo+The+Great+Pope%27&limit=&weight_search=1 . The first record is also a record which could be linked to this authority, but most of the others refer to different Popes called Leo. You see how much work this is? But sorting out the popes will be worth it, as someone looking for books by or on certain popes will benefit from better linked data/books. Some of this process is semi-automated, but it is usually better to check that no books are linked in error to an authority, and the merging of authorities can also be tricky.
Why is this such a problem?
When we migrated to Koha in June 2025, our data was not in tip top shape (I won’t bore you with all the reasons why that was the case here, but maybe will write in another blog post about this). In our previous system (Sierra) we could not fix such data easily, but in Koha it is relatively easy to do so, and so we are now working on this, quietly in the background, and hope that you and the library users will see the benefits.
CG