Home → Cataloging Bibliographic Records → Deduplication and Clean Up Projects → The Waves Clean Up
Last Updated 03/09/2026
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The Waves clean-up is the initial stage of the annual deduplication process, aimed at addressing records with missing or incorrect format icons. This procedure ensures that different formats, such as print and audiobooks, are not improperly merged during the deduplication process. The initial Waves clean-up results in two lists: records flagged for new format icons and will be changed automatically when the process is run live, and records that may need new format icons, but require manual evaluation of records.
This presentation outlines the Waves clean up and deduplication process and describes the criteria used for the process.
The Waves clean up is the first step in the annual deduplication process. It is run by Mobius. During this process, an automatic process identifies any records with missing or potentially incorrect format icons and attempts to correct them, based on the data in the record. This Waves clean up is first because the format icons are used in the deduplication process to make sure that different formats are not being merged, like regular and large print books, or physical and audiobooks.
Note: The Waves clean up does not convert all format icons. The formats that it can convert icons to are Electronic, Audiobook, Video, Large Print, and Music.
The initial Waves clean up list Mobius provides is not precisely the list that will be affected when the actual process is run "for real." It is a test run, applying the algorithm on a copy of the bibliographic data at a point in time. When Mobius runs it for real on the production data, Mobius will produce a new and "final" spreadsheet of the bibliographic records that were affected. A large percentage of the initial “test” spreadsheet will be included, but there will be new data add, and some records will be removed because the data changed between the time of the “test” run and the time of the “real” run.
In the resulting spreadsheets for both the Waves clean up and the deduplication process, there are two categories present:
Once the initial Waves clean up has been run, members of the Cataloging Interest Group will review the Waves clean up spreadsheet and see if there is anything that jumps out to them as a problem in the “Auto” sheets.
The reviewers’ role at this stage is to review the "Auto" sheets and see if the "winning" format icon is correct. If not, catalogers will need to tweak the criteria used to determine the winning format icon so that the correct format icon is selected. Basically, the Catalogers are trying to confirm that the process is making good determinations on what the format icons should be.
The “Needs Humans” lists are "at your leisure." Each record needs to be looked at and evaluated for its format. Once it has been reviewed, the human should introduce a =903 tag so that another human does not spend time on it.
=903$a should contain your name or tag or library or whatever you decide you want to identify yourself.
=903$b is the action taken.
=903$c is the date. A strict date format works best.
=903$d is any extra information you want to include.
Look at the example =903 tags that the software created on bibs from the “Auto” list:
=903 \\$amobius-catalog-fix$b05-15-2021$cformatted$dL a r g e P r i n t
The “Needs Humans” lists can take time to work through. It is not absolutely required that they be completed before performing the deduplication. Having them done, however, makes the deduplication process that much better.
When adding the =903, it is crucial that you do not introduce any of the keywords that the software is looking for so the bib does not get additional format votes.