Cleaning up duplicated authority records

How do duplicate authorities occur?

There are several ways these duplicates can be created.

• There may be a case where you have two authorities, one with the proper spelling and one that is misspelled. Editing the misspelled authority to have the same value as the properly spelled authority would create a duplicate.
• All fields in the authority are not the same as the original authority and a new one was created.
• There may be some other procedure during a group edit or other action that might have produced a duplicate

How do I clean these up if I choose to?

1. First identify which duplicate has less references by clicking on "Show records using this authority".
   
2. Select all the records that are returned and add them to a new label. This will allow you to find them in the next step.
3. Go back to the authority you identified in step one and delete that authority.
4. Exit the authority and open the label you created in step two. Select all the items in that label and do a group edit to add the authority value back to the records and save.