BCC01/Auth/4

LITA/ALCTS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group

Program and Business Meeting, ALA Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, June 17, 2001

This year’s ACIG session was titled "By What Authority? How Multiple Sources of Authority are Changing our Concept of Control" and featured three speakers who discussed various aspects and problems concerning the integration of multiple sources of authority headings into a single database. Barbara Tillett (LC) began with a presentation called "Authority Control on the Web." She began by reviewing various projects that are attempting to facilitate authority control on an international level, and discussed several scenarios as to how this might be accomplished. She also presented the "new view" of Universal Bibliographic Control, one which incorporates concepts such as: enabling users to choose their preferred script or language in which to display headings in the catalog, and linking forms established in various national authority files to create a virtual international authority file. She also discussed how catalogers might use such a virtual international authority file, and also suggested some possible models for its construction.

The second speaker was Linda Barnhart (UCSD). Her topic was "When Vocabularies Collide," which discussed a situation that developed at UCSD when several thousand Chinese language items and their associated bibliographic records were serendipitously acquired. Since these records were cataloged according to Chinese rules, the authorized name headings differed from those found in U.S. cataloging. She offered a variety of scenarios for dealing with this problem, including "Vocabulary Linking," a concept similar to that presented in MARBI discussion paper 2001-DP05 (http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2001/2001-dp05.html), "Vocabulary Clustering," similar to the scheme used by the Getty Union List of Artist Names (http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/ulan/), and a "Name Vocabulary Registry," similar to the clustering concept but with an intermediate "resolution service" that links the appropriate vocabulary from each database. She closed with a list of problems to be investigated, such as whether there exist other common standards for the formulation of name headings and the effectiveness of keyword searching for names.

The final speaker on the program was Bill Garrison (University of Colorado-Boulder), who spoke about the Colorado Digitization Project (http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org). This Project uses Dublin Core metadata to provide a union catalog of museums, historical societies, and research libraries. Because the CDP includes such a wide range of contributors, a variety of subject heading thesauri are merged into this one database. The system was demonstrated from the viewpoint of technical services, and a "Colorado List of Terms" – derived from the union catalog of bibliographic records – was shown. Several challenges were enumerated, including vocabulary mapping and matching with WebDewey vocabulary, with the aim of automatically assigning Dewey numbers.

Ann Della Porta (LC) followed with an update on Library of Congress activities.

• The conversion of Chinese-language materials from Wade-Giles to pinyin has been completed, and references from W-G forms were added to approx. 25,000 name authority records in March, 2001. This was viewed by LC as an "extraordinary step," since LC policy does not provide for headings to be added solely for maintenance purposes. These headings are coded $w nnea and will be removed in two years. Details can be found at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/wnnea2.html.
• Several new data elements in MARC21 for Authority Data were identified. These can be found in detail at http://lcweb.loc.gov/cds/notnewelements.html.
• Another item of interest was the issuance of instructions for the removal of newly differentiated names from undifferentiated authority records. The new instructions, which will issued as part of the Z1 pages, stipulate that a new NAR should always be created for the new, distinct name, and a 667 field stating "Formerly on undifferentiated name record: [LCCN of the undiff. record]" should be added to the new heading as well. The 1XX field in an undifferentiated headings should not be changed.
• Several new publications were announced, incl. a 3^rd ed. of the NACO Participants Manual, a new SACO Participants Manual (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/saco/sacomanual.pdf). An Ethnographic Thesaurus has been proposed to provide a consistent representation of ethnographic subject terminology.
• Instructions on Fiction Cataloging have been updated to reflect the new policy of assigning subject headings to American and English-language novels as time permits; see the most recent SCM:SH, H 1790. Instructions for Art Cataloging have also been revised in order to bring the location of geographic subdivisions in art subject headings into conformity to the standard order used for most other topics: see H 1250.
• The British Library has announced its intention to adopt MARC 21, with probable implementation at the same time as its new cataloging module.
• Authority headings and references are now available in the LC OPAC and should be available around Feb., 2002 in the Web version.
• A complete LC report is available at: http://www.loc.gov/ala/ala-update-2001.html

Finally, the session concluded with a business meeting.

• Shannon Hoffman (Brigham Young University) and Ann Della Porta (LC) were appointed the new chair and vice-chair, respectively, of ACIG.
• The program for 2002 midwinter’s managed discussion was announced as: "CORC Authorities and LC Authorities on the Web." An LC update and a discussion of the changes to art subject headings is also planned.
• For ALA Annual 2002, a tentative program titled "Real-world Steps Towards Semantic Interoperability" was proposed, centering around the efforts of IFLA’s Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) (http://www.ifla.org/VII/s12/mom/appendx2.htm), and the Linking and Exploring Authority Files group (LEAF) (http://www.crxnet.com/leaf/index.html).
• There was some discussion of having a music connection to the program for midwinter 2003, perhaps relating to uniform titles.
• It was also announced that OCLC’s CORC program was aiming to accept NACO contributions through the CORC database beginning in August, 2001. The same functionality currently available through Passport should be available in CORC, with the exception of the "save" and "respond" commands. Testing is currently underway for a "generate" command, which will function in much the same way the authorities macro (authwfm) does in Passport.

Submitted by Terry Simpkins

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Last updated October 1, 2001