Authority Control – Summary of Responses

Apologies for the delay in summarising the responses to my email back in the 
summer and thank you to my 16 respondents.

Your opinions, experiences and advice are much appreciated.

I hope that the following information will prove useful to several respondents 
who, like us, are wondering which way to go with authority control.

Desirability of Authority Control
Everyone who replied was in favour of authority control even those who were 
not currently able to maintain files.

“I believe that the exercise of authority control is an essential part 
of the maintenance of any library catalogue to ensure consistency of 
name and subject headings. The aim of authority control is surely to 
create unique headings for each author, editor and subject heading and 
to provide references from variant names and subjects. If we do not do 
this the library user will take longer to find all works held by 
specific authors or about specific subjects.”

Colin Duncan, Electronic Services Librarian, Inverclyde Libraries.

“We find that it maintains the integrity of our catalogues as well as 
making searching less cumbersome for our users. It ensures a more 
refined search mechanism.” 

Linda Younger, Information Manager, Northumbria University.

“One of the fundamental questions that a catalogue has to answer 
is, "what do you have by this author / on this topic?"  Without a common 
heading or identifier this is impossible”. 

Alan Danskin, British Library. 

Authority Control Standards
The advent of MARC21 and the ability to purchase or share records more 
readily has meant that there is a steady move towards using standard Library 
of Congress name authorities  http://authorities.loc.gov/ and subject 
headings. 

“We currently check the authorities on all of the imported records for new 
titles against our own authority file (which we have tried as far as possible to 
keep in line with LC) and we would use LC headings for any new authorities 
that we create.”

Deborah Offen, Subject collections Librarian Worcester 

“At Imperial College London we check all records on a weekly basis, using 
the OCLC authority file. Our own authority file is checked regularly and 
where necessary cross-refs and see also refs are created.” 

Ruth Newton, Head of Cataloguing, Imperial College London.

Electronic Resources - Impact on Authority Control.
Importing records of varying quality is problematic but once you have decided 
what your strategy is going to be there are resources that can make the task 
easier.

“We just manage them as best we can, and with regards to e-book records 
prioritise according to predicted stability of access to the relevant collections. 
Greater consistency is better than none whatsoever!” 

Martin Kelleher, University of Liverpool.

“The free ones are generally not the problem, as we get them singly or in small 
quantities, and can edit them. The problem comes when we download, eg, 
Early English Books Online, which is a fantastic product but is accompanied by 
nearly 100k hopeless catalogue records. Librarians collectively need to kick up 
a fuss about this.” 

 Nick James Bibliographic Services Librarian, University of Leicester Library

“All the resources I catalogue are electronic and free and open for use by 
anyone.  I use OCLC's Connexion to catalogue these resources which give me 
access to both Dewey classification and Library of Congress Name and Subject 
authority files. You should check OCLC's WorldCatLibrary.org to see if any of 
these electronic resources have already been catalogued to save duplication 
of effort.”

 Penny Robertson, Scottish Library and Information Council

Staffing/Training/Outsourcing.
Staff numbers and/or expertise; the number of files that you maintain and your 
LMS will all impact on your strategy for maintaining authority files. There are 
companies that will manage your files for you.

“We use Marcive http://www.marcive.com/HOMEPAGE/WEB1.HTM   to check 
and update our authority records using (mostly) LCSH and LC name headings.  
All of our new records either imported or in-house get sent to Marcive on a 
monthly basis.  We do not have the staff to do the checking needed, so this 
works reasonably well for us and does not cost too much.”

Nicette Ammar, University of Plymouth

 “We have recently had our catalogue cleaned by an external company and 
are currently working through outstanding reports from them in terms of 
tidying up non-existent / duplicated authorities.  We have also taken 
out a subscription to an ongoing process they provide, whereby new 
records are checked by them and incorrect authorities highlighted for 
correction.”

Helen Williams, London School of Economics

For further help and advice you can subscribe to Autocat
http://www.cwu.edu/~dcc/Autocat-ToC-2007.html
Thanks to Flora Lee of the National Library of Scotland for telling me about this 
forum.

Andrew Coburn, Acquisitions & Cataloguing Manager, Essex Libraries and Chair 
of the Cataloguing and Indexing Group also contacted me to say that the 
Group had discussed the possibility of providing training on authority control 
and related tasks possibly in early 2009.

Yes please!

I have compiled a document containing all of the responses received so please 
let me know if you would like me to send you a copy.

Jane Daniels
Information Advisor
UWIC
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