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:
“I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk and leaves; but I shall perhaps be enabled to speak with more precision and authority by and by,—if philosophy and sentiment are not buried under a multitude of details.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—D.H. (David Herbert)
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—Hugh O’Neill (20th century)