Authority Control: State of the Art and New Perspectives

Authority control is necessary for meeting the catalog’s objectives of enabling users to find the works of an author and to collocate allworks of a person or corporate body. This article looks at the current state of authority control as compared to the visions of the 1979 LITA (Library Information and Technology Association) Institutes and the 1984 Authority Control Interest Group. It explores a new view of IFLA’s Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) and a future vision of a virtual international authority file as a building block for the Semantic Web, and reinforces the importance of authority control to improve the precision of searches of large databases or the Internet.