Authority Control and Cooperative Cataloging
Before the advent of digital Online public access catalogs and the Internet, creating and maintaining a library's authority files was generally carried out by individual cataloging departments within each library––that is, if such cataloguing was done at all. This often resulted in substantial disagreement between different libraries over which form of a given name was considered authoritative. As long as a library's catalog was internally consistent, differences between catalogs did not matter greatly.
However, even before the Internet revolutionized the way libraries go about cataloging their materials, catalogers began moving toward the establishment of cooperative consortia, such as OCLC and RLIN in the United States, in which cataloging departments from libraries all over the world contributed their records to, and took their records from, a shared database. This development prompted to the need for national standards for authority work.
In the United States, the primary organization for maintaining cataloging standards with respect to authority work operates under the aegis of the Library of Congress, and is known as the Name Authority Cooperative Program, or NACO Authority.
Read more about this topic: Authority Control
Famous quotes containing the words authority, control and/or cooperative:
“The government, which is the supreme authority in states, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many. The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been “Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have any chance to look out for themselves.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Then we grow up to be Daddy. Domesticated men with undomesticated, frontier dreams. Suddenly life—or is it the children?—is not as cooperative as it ought to be. It’s tough to be in command of anything when a baby is crying or a ten-year-old is in despair. It’s tough to feel a sense of control when you’ve got to stop six times during the half-hour ride to Grandma’s.”
—Hugh O’Neill (20th century)