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:
“No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778)
“Who can control his fate?”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“Then we grow up to be Daddy. Domesticated men with undomesticated, frontier dreams. Suddenly lifeor is it the children?is not as cooperative as it ought to be. Its tough to be in command of anything when a baby is crying or a ten-year-old is in despair. Its tough to feel a sense of control when youve got to stop six times during the half-hour ride to Grandmas.”
—Hugh ONeill (20th century)