96/sa/2
Annual Report
Bibliographic Control Committee, Authorities Subcommitte
Mark Scharff, chair; Marilyn Craig, Cheryl Gowing, Ruth Inman, Michelle Koth, Suzanne
Mudge, Jane Penner, Joy Pile
At the 1996 MLA Annual Meeting in Seattle, the Authorities Subcommittee held a program
session at its Open Meeting. Kenneth Calkins of Northwestern University presented an
online demonstration of the "Cataloger's Toolkit", an application designed to
run with the NOTIS Library Management System that provided for automatic verification of
headings in bibliographic records and the creation of local authority records from
information in bibliographic records. Reports of Subcommittee activities followed,
delivered to an audience of ca. 90 people. The chair of the Subcommittee passed from Linda
Barnhart to Mark Scharff, and the resignation of Sue Stancu from the Subcommittee was
accepted with regret. Three new members -- Michelle Koth, Joy Pile, and Suzanne Mudge --
were nominated and appointed to serve on the Subcommittee.
Current projects include:
- Assuming the maintenance of the Final Report of the Working Group on Types of
Composition and mounting a Web version at the MLA Clearinghouse
- Entering discussion with LC about the possibility of authorizing NACO participants to
add field 680 to name authority records to provide user information, particularly death
dates for persons whose headings contain an open date
- Finishing a list of authority-related specifications to be used in assessing vendor
proposals for online systems
- Developing a formal statement for consideration as an official MLA position on the need
for authority control
- Keeping track of a proposal by LC to pursue the possibility of implementing the USMARC
Authorities Format capability of including 7XX fields for other authorized forms of
names/titles/series; that would open up the authority files to international usage and
machine-manipulation across systems that use different cataloging rules for forms of
headings. With implementation of a 7XX subfield code to identify the source rules or
system, authority records for the same entities could be linked while the cross reference
structures for each language, culture, or cataloging standard could be preserved. This has
interesting implications for music name-title authority records, which have always
contained references in multiple languages.
Submitted by Mark Scharff, Chair
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Last updated February 4, 2000