New CMS functionality: Resolving duplicate Party records via ‘Reassign Party Links’ - March 2024

New CMS functionality: Resolving duplicate Party records via ‘Reassign Party Links’ - March 2024

Victorian Collections has introduced new functionality in our latest system update - the Reassign Party Links action.


This action is made from within an individual Party record in an organisation’s Parties catalogue, and is designed to assist cataloguers working to resolve unwanted duplicate Party records.


The new action builds on previous improvements to Party records and the Parties catalogue made in October 2022.

While cataloguing with Victorian Collections, you may discover duplicate or similar Party records in your Parties catalogue. These duplications might exist for a range of intentional or unintentional reasons, such as:
  1. separate people/organisations with identical names (e.g. multiple John Smiths)
  2. multiple entries which are known to be the same Party
  3. duplicates of the same Party with minor variations or misspellings (e.g. Jon Smith, John Smith, John Smyth)
  4. Parties which have had name changes over time (e.g. Telecom Australia / Telecom / Telstra)

Where unintentional and unwanted duplicate Party records exist, the Reassign Party Links action can be used to help ensure the preferred Party from a set of duplicates is correctly linked in the Provenance Section of the relevant Item records, so that unwanted duplicate Party records can be deleted.

The VC Team considers the Reassign Party Links action an Advanced feature of Victorian Collections. To help organisations build capacity and confidence in using the new function, the action requires a specific user permission be switched on before use. Your organisation’s administrator can modify permissions if this action is required.


Learn more about using the Reassign Party links action via our Knowledge Base article, ‘Managing Party records’.


Using the Reassign Party links action is also explored in greater detail in our upcoming Advanced Features workshop, which will be delivered via Zoom on Tuesday May 7.