In May 2007, the Library of Congress released a statement of its intention to create and distribute subject authority records for validation purposes.
The first such records were released on July 9, 2007 and a few hundred distributed each of the next few months. On February 18, 2008, LC announced its plan to begin distributing larger numbers of these authority records -- 5,000 per week, rising to a 25,000 weekly.
LTI clients have been receiving these records since distribution began; they are subject-related and appear in the *.lcs file. The records allow a small number of headings to be "linked fully to LC", rather than "linked partially" -- a status not tracked by the statistics for Authority Express (AEX) or Authority Update Processing (AUP).
Initially, LTI did not see them as having a great deal of impact on LTI clients. The number of subject-related authority records will, over time, increase, but we don't expect ever to do away with our parsing and validation of floats because no library has exactly the same collection as LC, with only the subject heading strings used in the LC records. This type of record may be useful in a local system which requires an authority record for every controlled heading, and especially for libraries which lack a comprehensive authority control service, like LTI's AEX and AUP services.
However, some libraries have expressed concern about the number of records which they will receive as LC increases the number created and distributed -- expected by LC to be several hundred thousand to one million. In response, LTI is offering an option to exclude these authority records from the file of authority records returned to the library. If this option is selected, the subject-related authority records will be scanned for the presence of the 667 note "Record generated for validation purposes" and, if it is present, that authority record will be excluded from its ".lcs" file.
This option is controlled by the library's profile so a profile change is required. Please please contact Marsha Hunt if your library wants to stop receiving the "validation records." Unless a profile change is requested, libraries will continue to receive all such "validation" records.