A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — J u n e 2 0 0 3

How Clean Is Your Catalog?

By Linda Gonzalez

Has every bibliographic heading in your catalog for Tchaikovsky been input as "Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 1840-1893" or do you also have "Tchaikovski, Piotr Ilyitch, 1840-1893"? If patrons search for "Chaikovsky" will they be led to the composer's works? Can your patrons tell, from your catalog, that Agatha Christie also wrote as "Mary Westmacott?"

If your answer to these questions is "no," perhaps you should consider improving the authority control in your bibliographic database. The consistent form of access points in bibliographic records can markedly improve patron (and staff) success in finding the resources they want and need. It allows the patron who searches for "Chaikovsky" to retrieve all of the records in your catalog for Tchaikovsky via a cross-reference, and it ensures retrieval of the bibliographic records for every CD, cassette or score you own of the Nutcracker Suite or 1812 Overture, no matter the language or wording of the titles on the individual physical items themselves. The Agatha Christie fan would happily discover, by a "see-also" reference, Mary Westmacott's books.

A database with good authority control fulfills the basic goals of the modern library catalog: that a user should be able to find in the catalog what resources a library has by any given author, on any given subject or in a given type of literature, so that he or she may find the desired item. First enunciated by Charles Ammi Cutter in his Rules for a Dictionary Catalog in 1876, these goals are as valid today as ever before, though in the current era, what a library has should perhaps be expanded to include those resources to which a library has access.

What Is Authority Control?
There is no direct mention of "authority control" in the current Anglo-American Cataloging Rules. But the practice is implied in Part II of AACR2 in the chapters instructing how to determine access points or headings and how to construct them. Over time, phrases such as "authorized form of entry" (a heading that has been constructed according to the rules in AACR2) and "authority work" (the process of constructing or establishing headings) have developed among technical services librarians. "Authority control" is most often used to refer to the process of bringing existing bibliographic headings into compliance with their current authorized forms, or "cleaning them up."

Since AACR2 does not address the formulation of subject headings, libraries have come to rely on standardized lists such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Sears List of Subject Headings, Medical Subject Headings from the U.S. National Library of Medicine or Bilindex 2001 (a listing of Spanish equivalents to Library of Congress subject headings). Depending on the needs of their patrons and the nature of their collections, many libraries also utilize specialized thesauri such as the Guidelines on Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, Etc.; Art & Architecture Thesaurus; or the Transportation Research Thesaurus.

In this age of cooperative cataloging, authority work — the process of formulating a heading for a natural person, corporate body or geographic jurisdiction according to AACR2 — is shared. The Library of Congress (LC) and participants in NACO (the name authority program component of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging or PCC) create authority records for names and uniform titles that appear on items they catalog originally. The Library of Congress maintains its own subject headings and has created SACO (the subject authority cooperative component of the PCC), a program wherein any individual cataloger at any institution who needs a subject heading not available in LCSH may forward a proposed subject heading to be established within LCSH. Information on the PCC and its programs may be found at www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/. Other subject heading lists and thesauri may or may not be cooperatively maintained.

Authority Records Document Headings' Form
An authority record is the documentation of the authorized form of a heading, with any necessary cross- references and notes about resources used to establish the heading. The MARC 21 Format for Authority Data exists so that authority records may be stored, retrieved and transmitted electronically in their own structured MARC format. It makes cooperatively created authority records easy to share. LC, NACO and SACO authority records are available from the Library of Congress at authorities.loc.gov/. For OCLC members, authority records are available in the OCLC Authority File, accessible via OCLC Connexion, Cataloging Micro Enhancer or Passport services (until Passport's demise for cataloging at the end of this year). The availability of these shared records greatly decreases the number of instances an individual cataloger must create headings from scratch.

MARC authority records are also utilized for automating the correction of headings. Many local systems allow staff to globally change or replace invalid or outdated headings in bibliographic records, based on cross-references within authority records. This capability can save an enormous amount of work. Such automated "flipping" of headings cannot happen in certain situations, however, such as when one subject heading is canceled and replaced by two or more. When the LC subject "Inscriptions, Oscan- Umbrian" was canceled in favor of two replacements, "Inscriptions, Oscan" and "Inscriptions, Umbrian," there is no reliable way for most local systems to know which of the two would be correct for a certain book, or if both would be necessary. An evaluation of the bibliographic description, or the item itself, would be necessary. That can only be accomplished by human eyes. It would also not be appropriate for software to flip the heading "Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint" to "Madonna, 1958-" based upon the cross-reference from "Madonna, The" in the authority record for "Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint."

Several well-known library vendors, such as Library Systems & Services (LSSI), Library Technologies, Inc. (LTI), Marcive and OCLC MARC Record Service (MARS), offer authority control services. Their prices vary. If authority work has not been done in the past and your bibliographic database is too large for available staff to clean up, you may want to consider contracting with a vendor. The payoff in terms of patron and staff time saved, better retrieval of library resources and increased satisfaction could be well worth it.

For more information, please contact Linda Gonzalez at BCR, (800) 397-1552, or lgonzale@bcr.org. BCR also offers an online workshop, "Authority Control Issues," with more details on this topic: www.bcr.org/workshop/web-based.html#authy. To register, please go to www.bcr.org/training/workshops/register.html.

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