Authority Control of Works: Cataloging’s Chimera?

Explicit authority control of works is essentially non-existent. Our catalogs are built on a principle of controlling headings, and primarily headings for names of authors. Our syndetic structure creates a spider’s web of networked relationships among forms of headings, but it ends there, despite the potential richness of depth among bibliographic entities. Effective authority control of works could yield richness in the catalog that would enhance retrieval capabilities. Works are considered to constitute the intellectual content of informative artifacts that may be collected and ordered for retrieval. In a 1992 study, the author examined a random sample of works drawn from the catalog of the Georgetown University Library. For each progenitor work, an instantiation network (also referred to as a bibliographic family) was constituted. A detailed analysis of the linkages that would be required for authority control of these networks is reviewed here. A new study is also presented, in which Library of Congress authority records for the works in this sample are sought and analyzed. Results demonstrate a near total lack of control, with only 5.6% of works for which authority records were found. From a sample of 410 works, of which nearly half have instantiation networks,only 23 works could be said to have implicit authority control. However, many instantiation networks are made up of successive derivations that can be implicitly linked through collocation. The difficult work of explicitly linking instantiations comes with title changes, translations, and containing relations. The empirical evidence in the present study suggests that explicit control of expressions will provide the best control over instantiation networks because it is instantiations such as translations, abridgments, and adaptations that require explicit linking. [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.]