Commercial Services for Providing Authority Control: Outsourcing the Process

This paper examines the commercial services available for providing authority control in online catalogs. It identifies common reasons cited by libraries for outsourcing authority control and examines in-depth the types of authority control services. These include retrospective cleanup of the authority and bibliographic files, ongoing authority control work for newly cataloged bibliographic records and previously cataloged records where headings have changed, and periodic file reauthorizations when there was a one-time retrospective authority control database cleanup, but the library did not contract ongoing authority control services. The three phases of the outsourced authority control process are discussed, including preprocessing, machinematching, andmanual record review. Finally, reports produced by the vendors are mentioned and challenges for automated international authority control are discussed. [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.]