Authority Control in the 21st Century: An Invitational Conference
Authority Control in the 21st Century: An Invitational Conference
Libraries are in the business of organizing information and providing access and order to the bibliographic universe. To impose that order, we have considered it important to control access for works, persons, corporate bodies, and subject concepts. At the same time, we have recognized that cataloging is an expensive activity, and the most expensive part of cataloging is authority work. Authority work includes identifying distinctive entities and distinguishing among them through authorized forms of their names and providing references from variant forms and to related names. While technology can assist us in this work, ultimately it is a human being who must make these discriminations.
How then can we approach the authority control issue in a way that might allow all of us to reap the benefits of others' efforts, while maintaining our ability to use forms of name that we feel are most appropriate for our own users.
Part 2 of AACR2 goes into great detail about how to construct the authorized forms of names and titles we use as access points, suggesting that there should be only one form used by everyone and that variant forms should be linked to the authorized form through references. This philosophy of using a single authorized form for a heading provides unity and order to an individual catalog. Users of that catalog know what to expect. However, it presents problems on an international scale.
Within a particular country with a predominant language, a single form of name may be acceptable for economic reasons, even though that name might not be perceived to be the best choice for a given constituency. But as bibliographic and authority records are shared in the international community, the use of a single form conflicts with the principle of trying to provide cataloging records that serve the needs of the library user--that is, providing bibliographic information in the language of the patrons and following the conventions of that language as used in that country or community.
I have written and spoken for many years about the idea of moving away from the concept of "authority control" to "access control," and by that I mean providing more flexibility in user views of which form of a name, title, or subject they want to see for an entity. This means that we need to move away from the idea that the name is the unique identifier for the entity; as long as we maintain that view, then each time we want to use a different name, we are forced to recognize a different entity. Such a view is inconsistent with what we know to be true in the real world. When we equate a single form of name for the entity with the entity itself, we ignore the international perspective. We could perhaps better achieve much more agreement on what an entity is and what its characteristics are, than on what single form of its name everybody in the world has to call it.
[TRANSPARENCY 1]
Let's look at an example. Certain kinds of information, such as birth date and death date, are single facts about a person that will be true across the board, regardless of country or language of cataloging (although dates can be expressed according to different calendars). Names, however, behave quite differently. Even within the same country and same language, a person may be known by several different names. Some of these names may be pseudonyms. Some names may be appropriate only during a certain time period. For example, a woman's married name may be different from her maiden name. These complexities are compounded when the element of language is introduced. For example, English speakers will most likely talk about Confucius, while Japanese speakers are apt to talk about Koshi.
The most variable element, and the one about which there is apt to be the most disagreement, is the name used to refer to the person -- and that is the very thing we have chosen to be the defining element in the authority record. Wouldn't it be better if our authority records were structured so that they conveyed information that was closer to the information as it exists in the real world? Various names are linked to the entity, PERSON, and we can implement displays in various ways, once we have organized the information about the entities in a clear manner.
[TRANSPARENCY 2]
In addition to constant attributes about the person, corporate body, work, or subject, there is more information we want to keep about the relationship between the PERSON and the name, such as the set of rules used to establish the form of name or in what sort of cataloging or environment we want to use that name as a preferred form or as a reference. By providing a clear indication of the "authority" for the form of name (whether as heading or reference), the computer can then construct the paths from variations that we may wish to provide to our users as a default.
[TRANSPARENCY 3]
It also leaves open the possibility for users to decide the form they prefer. Your computer system could use the default form you preferred for your users or the user could be allowed to choose.
With files ever increasing in size, we need controlled access more than ever (see for example the work of Jamieson, Dolan, and Declerck). Keyword access, even weighted systems, like LC's THOMAS, will become unwieldy with hundreds of thousands of items retrieved, many of which are irrelevant. This brings home the problems of precision versus recall. With many computer systems today, we are able to retrieve anything with a given word appearing in the text or in the bibliographic description, perhaps weighted so that those with the word in the title are moved closer to the top of the weighted listing. However, we will have poor precision, that is poor ability to retrieve only relevant items, because the English language and other languages reflected in our catalogs are rich in homonyms, which result in retrievals of irrelevant information on different topics or by different people with similar names because they look alike to the computer. Our languages are also rich in synonyms, which means poor recall, if we don't control access forms and allow use of all the variant forms possible - users will have a difficult time remembering to look for every variation.
More than ever, with a rapidly expanding volume of resources on the Internet and more electronic materials becoming available daily, we will want control over access, so our users are not overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available, but are able to select what is relevant for their needs. With access control, users can be assured they have all relevant materials attributed to a person, corporate body, conference, series, subject, or work. Without it, they will miss information and not know that they have missed it.
[TRANSPARENCY 4]
Without access control, users searching under Gibbs, R. or even Gibbs, Rebecca for her books on aerodynamics will not realize they haven't retrieved Becky Gibbs' materials on the same topic or Rebecca Henderson's works written after she divorced and returned to using her maiden name. But that user may go away under the false impression of having retrieved everything the library had by that author on aerodynamics.
Without access control the responsibility falls to the user each and every time to search under nicknames, variant initialisms, corporate hierarchies, foreign language titles for works they think of in English - all of the variations we collocate for them now through authority control would be missing. With ever larger files, we do need controlled access more than ever. But how do we manage to provide controlled access and still meet the requirements to be cost conscious and aware of the needs of the growing world population using shared bibliographic and authority records?
Last year, the Library of Congress established a total of about 127,000 new name and series authority records and about 9,000 new subject terms. Our partners in cooperative cataloging programs contributed about 97,000 additional name and series records. These figures continue to go up with the assistance of cooperative partners contributing to the shared resource authority files.
There is work underway to expand contributions to our shared resource authority files and bibliographic files through the work of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). This cooperative work has been going on for several years under the aegis of various programs, such as the National Coordinated Cataloging Program and NACO (Name Authority Cooperative Project) in the United States, and in the past few years has been expanded to include contributions from partners in England, Canada, and Australia. In February 1996, the Library of Congress and the British Library reached a major milestone in agreeing on practices for cataloging, and the British Library loaded the Library of Congress authority files to use in creating an Anglo-American Authority File (AAAF). The AAAF is a file of headings established according to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. Also, the National Library of Canada, the British Library, and the Library of Congress continue to work towards the harmonization of MARC formats. These are giant steps towards further sharing the work of cataloging in the Anglo-American traditions.
But beyond the Anglo-American framework, there are even more opportunities for sharing the work of cataloging. The internationalization of authority work is not a new idea. Substantial work was conducted through the auspices of IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) starting with the 1961 Paris Principles and the IFLA concepts of Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC). There is a wonderful summary of the efforts made by IFLA written by Tom Delsey in 1989, "Authority Control in an International Context," which I commend to you to read.
Delsey reminds us that starting with the 1961 Paris Principles, IFLA sought to provide guidelines and basic agreements at the international level to facilitate shared cataloging. In 1963 IFLA published its "Names of Persons," which has undergoneseveral editions (1963, 1967, 1977, 1980 supplement, and a new edition was due out in 1995). In 1980 IFLA issued its guidelines entitled "Form and Structure of Corporate Headings," and I am currently chairing the IFLA committee looking at a revision or modification of that work. All of these publications recognized the national traditions of language, culture, and social structures and tried to respect those in cataloging conventions.
The IFLA guidelines prefer the vernacular as the basis for authoritative headings. The dilemma is, of course, the conflicting tensions between respecting the country of origin's preferences and meeting the needs of conventional usage in one's own country and users of one's own catalog.
The first principle of Universal Bibliographic Control is that each nation assumes responsibility for establishing authoritative headings for its national authors. The second principle of UBC is that all other countries are expected to accept such headings in their authoritative form as established by the country of origin. They are to forego their own national conventions and their own users' conventions in order to facilitate exchange of authority records at the international level. This is, of course, very difficult to accomplish due to concerns about serving the needs of local users.
As we move toward sharing bibliographic information internationally, we need to accommodate the authorized forms used by various communities rather than trying to impose a single form on all users. These communities may be user groups that are in different countries, but could even be communities that speak the same language or are in the same country, but have different needs, such as a community of users who are children versus a university research community.
[TRANSPARENCY 5]
A record that provides such controlled access might be displayed like this totally hypothetical example. The computer system or cataloger or end user of this controlled access record can quickly see the form of name to use when searching or citing other tools or when trying to reach a particular audience - scholarly community in Germany, general public in the United States, children, etc. This structure for a shared record for access control demonstrates that we can determine the specific entity and associate with it the various names and their sources, as well as relationships to other entities.
[TRANSPARENCY 6 - same as 3]
Wouldn't we be better off if we concentrated on coding the information itself for what it is, and left it to the automated systems to provide the type style, punctuation, and display layout? If we wanted to display a person's birth and death dates after the name, we could do so, choosing to set the dates off by a comma or parentheses. If a particular library did not want to do this, their systems would not have to serve up dates in conjunction with the name. But we could still all use a single authority record to generate these different displays. And this would allow any individual institution not only to provide a default form based on language, country, or user community associated with the target user group of a library's catalog, but also to provide the flexibility for letting the user decide to display a different form or query by terms in a different language.
In 1978 IFLA conducted a study on authority files and established a Working Group on an International Authority System that standardized the content and structure of authority records in print and machine-readable form and proposed a "system" for authority control and exchange of authority data on an international scale. They proposed a network of interrelated national databases of authority records with a central facility to control the system, that is to manage links between related authority records from various national centers and to redirect packages of authority data to the appropriate national center.
The Working Group envisioned a standard number, like ISBN and ISSN for an authority entry (ISADN, International Standard Authority Data Number) to be present in all variant records to serve as the identity, so that this number could be recorded in bibliographic records after being registered through UBC. Any subsequent bibliographic or authority records submitted to the international resource files would trigger automatic adjustment of the form to what was required at the national level. However, when IFLA tried to implement this idea in the early 1980's, they ran into problems in administering such a system to assign numbers. IFLA is now taking another look at the ISADN this May in London, and I will be attending that meting on behalf of the Library of Congress.
I would like to suggest that international authority records should be access control records, wherein we could record the preferred form as established by each country or national bibliographic agency, realizing that many such agencies will use the same forms. Actually, I can see this as either a single access control record or linked parallel control records for each language and culture base, creating a virtual single record for the entity. Variant language catalogs will have different reference structure needs. My preference is to have a single control record with the ability to code which authoritative form and which references are to be selected for a given catalog or a given view of a catalog.
At the 1995 ALA in Chicago, OCLC sponsored the meeting on the "Future is Now: Authority Control..." At that meeting I spoke about authority control in the 21st century and described the notion of the internationalization of authority work and the creation of international shared resource records for controlled access. Since that meeting I have had discussions with libraries in Germany and Australia, and will be going to Russia for similar discussions in April and to London for an IFLA meeting in May. I have also received indications of interest in Brazil. I think the reason this is catching on now is that the Internet has made it very easy to remotely access the wealth of online shared resource files of bibliographic and authority records, particularly those created by libraries in the Anglo-American tradition, primarily in the United States. Also libraries are very cost conscious. Actually they have been for over a hundred years as witnessed in the debates Panizzi had with the Trustees of the British Museum in the early 1800's, but we always seem to think now we are more concerned with the expense of cataloging than ever before.
An international shared resource authority file whether real or virtual, should be available worldwide to provide consistent access to bibliographic entities, including names for works (including series and uniform titles in both title and author/title forms), persons, corporate bodies, jurisdictions, geographic names, topical subjects, etc. The records in such a file would incorporate different preferred and variant forms of name, identifying the authoritative thesaurus or rules, context, and links to related entities. Local systems would capture needed subsets of this international file for the local authority file.
We can all think of many advantages in sharing in the work of controlled access for library catalogs. The economic benefits on an international scale are enormous, as we would save the cost of currently redundant authority work. And now, the possibility of exchanging information internationally via a shared access control record is feasible with computer technology and advances in telecommunications.
What a great time to be a cataloger!
Delsey, Tom. "Authority Control in an International Context," Authority Control in the Online Environment: Considerations and Practices, Barbara B. Tillett, Editor. New York : Haworth Press, 1989, p. 13-28. (Also published as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, v.9, no. 3 (1989): 13-28.)
Jamieson, Alexis J., Elizabeth Dolan, and Luc Declerck. "Keyword Searching vs. Authority Control in an Online Catalog," Journal of Academic Librarianship 12 (November 1986): 277-283.
Tillett, Barbara B. "Access Control: a Model for Descriptive, Holding, and Control Records." In: Convergence : proceedings of the Second National Conference of the Library and Information Technology Association, October 2-6, 1988, Boston, Massachusetts / Michael Gorman, editor. -- Chicago : American Library Association, 1990, p. 48-56.
Tillett, Barbara B. "21st Century Authority Control: What Is It and How Do We Get There?" In: The Future Is Now: Reconciling Change and Continuity in Authority Control. Proceedings of the OCLC Symposium, ALA Annual Conference, June 23, 1995. -- Dublin, Ohio : OCLC, 1995, p. 17-21.
NAME: gibbs, r
Result set:
Gibbs, R.
Gibbs, R. (Rebecca), 1943-
Gibbs, R. H.
Gibbs, R. Timothy
Gibbs, Rachel
Gibbs, Rebecca
Gibbs, Richard Talbot, 1901-1968.
Gibbs, Robert Benjamin, 1848-1899.
and
SUBJECT: aerodynamics
Result set:
Gibbs, R. Aerodynamic principles. 1988
Gibbs, Rebecca Aerodynamic principles. 1990
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Misses the other uncontrolled:
Gibbs, Becky Popular aerodynamics. 1979
Henderson, Rebecca Aerodynamic principles. 4th rev. ed. 1996
Hypothetical Display
Access Control Record
Search name: angelico, fra
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name / Source Heading / Reference
Angelico, fra / AACR,VR / PN,RAK
Italian
artist
painter
born: ca. 1387 / EB /
ca. 1400 / BHA,LC /
Angelico, Fra / RAK / CH,VR
Angelico, Fra Giovanni / / AACR,RAK,VR
Angelico, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole / PN / AACR,RAK,VR
B. angelico da Fiesole / / VR
B. Gio. Angelo da Fiesole / / VR
Beato Da Fiesole / / VR
Da Fiesole / / VR
Fiesole, Giovanni da / / AACR,RAK,VR
Fra Angelico / CH / RAK,VR
Giovanni da Fiesole / / VR
Guido da Vicchio / / AACR
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