Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 16, pp. 63-66, 1992 0364~6408/92 $5.00 + .OO

Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright 0 1992 Pergamon Press plc

ALA MID WINTER CONFERENCE 1991

AUTHORITY CONTROL: WHOSE PAIN IS IT?

BARBARA ANDERSON

Interim Head, Bibliographic Services Dept.

Virginia Commonwealth University

Library Services

Box 2033

Richmond. VA 23284-2033

It is very interesting to me that the topic of authority control is being addressed by a group of acquisitions librarians. I am sure the issue is not a new one to many of you, but the op- portunity to discuss the implications of performing authority work at the point of ordering caught me by surprise.

In the mid-1970s I worked in a Bibliographic Search unit at the University of Iowa, where I performed pre-order and precataloging searches. As I dimly recall, in our efforts to avoid unnecessary duplication, the searchers made regular use of the library’s series authority card files, and it was helpful to maintain at least an awareness of established forms of names and uniform titles when we translated blurbs from publishers’ catalogs into likely entries in the library’s card catalog.

In Iowa in the 70s and in Virginia in the early 80s (and, I will wager, in many other places even today), the only public notification of items being ordered was through the use of tem- porary slips filed by title in the card catalogs. The title was the primary and often the only point of access for on-order material. In other words, my impression is that acquisitions staff have needed to know a little about authority control to conduct pre-order searching, but they haven’t needed to actually do any authority work on items they were ordering. So how did nice people like you get caught up in the authority control web? Automation!

Now, instead of filing title slips into order files and card catalogs, we find ourselves load- ing records into local databases and attaching orders to them. These are records that the pub- lic sees, and they come from all over the place. If a record we need is not available from a vendor and there is no match in a large bibliographic utility, we make one up. Most of these records can be searched by more than just the title. This is great for the user, but for many of us it means more work! Why do we worry about authority control for items we do not have and may never have?

In the movie, Field of Dreams, an Iowa farmer goes through an enormous amount of per- sonal sacrifice to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field in response to a mys- terious voice that commands, “Ease his pain.” Well, I think that is what it boils down to for us, too. We are concerned about authority work, and, because of automation, we assign even more significance to it because we want to “ease their pain” (“they” being our library users,

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of course). The question, in my mind, is not whether there should be authority control for “on-order” items in our catalogs, but how much authority work is needed and who should do the work?

I understand that there are many acquisitions librarians who feel that they should be do- ing the authority control work for headings on records for items they are ordering. I am not sure that we all understand the term “authority control” in the same sense, so please indulge me while I trot out the tired old definition in the ALA Glossary:

authority control. The methods by which the authoritative forms of names, subjects, uniform titles,

and so on, used as headings in a file of bibliographic records are consistently applied and maintained.

Includes the file of authority records containing the authoritative forms with appropriate references and,

for a file of machine-readable records (a database), the mechanism whereby all records can be updated

automatically to maintain consistency with the authority file. [I]

The key aspects of authority control include applying authoritative forms of headings and maintaining the authoritative forms. Using an authority file is one thing, and, in my experi- ence, this has been and should continue to be a fairly traditional part of acquisitions work. Maintenance of an authority file is another issue altogether.

Authority work is virtually inseparable from the cataloging process, and I persist, conser- vatively, in believing that the primary responsibility for authority control should lie with catalogers (or a subset of catalogers), but that does not absolve acquisitions librarians com- pletely! The subtitle of this program asks the question: “What do catalogers want?” Well, for

one thing, catalogers want acquisitions staff to consider the contents of records on vendor tapes. We want you to consider carefully the quality of the records that you choose to down- load from bibliographic utilities and the quantity of headings you are adding to local cata- logs. We want you to use our authority files for doing pre-order searches and creating provisional records, and we want you to understand how they are used by library patrons. At Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), the implementation of automated acquisitions in 1986 demonstrated to catalogers that the burden of authority work can be eased through co- operation with acquisitions staff.

VCU has taken a fairly traditional approach to authority work. Our procedures have been disrupted this past year by a conversion from one automated system to another, but, basically, catalogers perform authority control on headings used on original cataloging records and on OCLC member cataloging copy. They verify the headings against the local authority file. If the headings are not found there, they verify them against the Library of Congress author- ity file (LCAF) on OCLC. If not found in either of those sources, they establish local author- ity file entries as necessary at the time of cataloging. They do not routinely verify headings on Library of Congress records (which are assumed to be pristine and error-free). When our local system produces a report of unique headings added recently to the database, cataloging staff compare the report with the Library of Congress authority file on OCLC. Headings that match are downloaded and added to the local authority file. Non-matches are assumed to be on the report either (1) because they were on member or original records that have been cataloged (for which authority work has already been done); or (2) because they were on records used for ordering, in which case they are skipped. To help us out, acquisitions staff use all upper-case letters on provisional records that they create themselves. Headings from these records are spotted easily on the postcataloging unique headings report and are dismissed without further searching. In addition, acquisitions staff have “stripped down” the records they add to include the title, series (if appropriate) and only one name access point. Subject

Authority Control: Whose Pain Is it? 65

headings and additional added entries are removed or suppressed from indexes until records are cataloged.

This is not a perfect system: no authority work is done for some headings on records used for ordering, and sometimes we add to our local authority file LCAF records associated with items we will never receive. It is a compromise situation, but it is manageable to cataloging and acquisitions staff. Some name access points are provided on acquisitions records, and some of them have had authority work applied (when it could be done with relatively little pain). Automation got us into this predicament, and we are heavily dependent on automation for our solutions.

Ideally, I would prefer that automation handle more of the authority work than either our cataloging or our acquisitions staffs. I would like to see the library and publishing worlds co- operate in adopting standards for the format and preparation of machine-readable text (used for the prepublication of printed material and/or the predistribution of electronic text). These standards would include coding or otherwise identifying information that would be assembled by an automated cataloging program into what would amount to a descriptive cataloging record complete with access points.

In a variation on the current CIP program, these descriptive cataloging records would be transmitted electronically to a national cataloging agency where experts and expert systems would compare access points with a universal authority file and determine the correct forms of headings. Call numbers and subject headings would also be assigned at this point before forwarding the completed cataloging record back to the publisher (for use on vendor tapes) and to bibliographic utilities. In this way, the bulk of the authority work would be done cen- trally. As cataloging records were used locally for ordering, each local library system would automatically check to see if each heading were represented in the local authority file, and, if not, it would claim it automatically from the universal authority file.

Obviously, this dream assumes that libraries and publishers adopt a much cozier relation- ship and that computers become smart enough that we can trust them NOT to convert head- ings for Madonna (the rock star) into “Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint” (a classic example of the dangers of automatic authority control reported in an issue of American Libraries a few years

ago). Meanwhile, if I were pressed (as I was) to describe “how authority control in the utopian

library” would work within the framework of today’s harsh realities, I would have to say that it would include these ingredients:

1. The ability for acquisitions staff to load into local systems records created by libraries committed to a common standard for determining access points and establishing forms of headings.

2. A national cataloging agency that performs prepublication cataloging (including author- ity work) and makes these prepublication records and its authority records available to others online.

3. A local system with: a, an online authority file in MARC format b. public display of cross references c. validation of name, series, and subject access points with reports of discrepancies be-

tween bibliographic headings and authority records d. the capability of performing global changes to headings

4. A working environment in which acquisitions staff and cataloging staff cooperate with a mutual understanding of each other’s goals and a tolerance for each other’s limitations.

66 B. ANDERSON

These are common everyday ingredients in many of our libraries. The first three are read- ily available to us now, and this discussion is evidence that catalogers and acquisitions librar- ians are trying very hard to work together. Authority control is not a self-serving interest for either of us. Our common goal is to ease the pain of the user. To steal another Field of Dreams line, in my own private utopia, the success of our efforts will lead to the day when a researcher looks up happily from a successful session at a catalog terminal and asks, “Is this heaven?” My answer: “No, it’s the library.”

REFERENCE

1. ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science. Chicago: American Library Association, 1983.