Authority Control in the Context of Bibliographic Control in the Electronic Environment

Defines authority control and vocabulary control and their place and utility in modern cataloguing. Discusses authority records and authority files and the use and purposes of each.Describes the creation of authority records and the sources from which authority data are collected. Discusses “metadata” schemes and their manifold and manifest inadequacies; points out the relationship of the Dublin Core to the MARC family of standards and the fact that both are framework standards–the first, simplistic and naïve; the second, complex and nuanced. Defines precision and recall as desiderata in indexing and retrieval schemes and relates them to authority control in catalogues. Discusses the problems involved in cataloguing electronic documents and resources, and proposes an international program under the Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) umbrella, using an international code of descriptive cataloguing, and based on an international name authority file. Calls for urgent action on these proposals. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]