2 - 07 Linked with authority control (people and documents)

Authority control

Authority control, in library science and information science, it is the practice of establishing and maintaining control of bibliographic materials in a library's catalog. The control of authorities fulfills two important functions: first, that catalogers can distinguish between similar or identical names; second, that they can have materials that are logically gathered, although they are presented differently.

The control of authorities is the set of processes that create, unify and update the access points of the automated catalogs and also shows the relationships between the different points, in a standardized way. Its purpose is to facilitate the search, identification and retrieval of stored documents, avoiding confusion and saving user time. To ensure that the works of a certain corporate or personal entity are recovered whenever a search is carried out, the heading must be determined and its authorized form established, also following international conventions and recommendations.

On the other hand, Rocío Acosta cites Schmierer and defines the control of authorities as the operation that consists of determining the access points and recording the decisions that have been made for their election, and comprises three activities:

The collection, registration and maintenance of authority data.
Verification of said data.
The use of established and authorized forms as access points in the library catalog.¹

A wasted professional tool

Luis Rodríguez Yunta defends that the catalog of authorities, in addition to being a professional tool, can play an important role in the retrieval of information. It is used as an example to highlight how libraries and documentary databases have not known or have failed to put their full potential into play in the knowledge society.

Descargar.

Linked data strategy

Moira Downey writes in her article how linked data is seen as a model that encourages storing metadata about digital objects in libraries, archives, and museums. There is a connection between the possibilities offered by linked data and the evolution of bibliographic control (the organization of book materials to facilitate discovery, management, identification and access). In the future this bibliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international and web-based. A first step is for entity names to go from being "strings" to "things" (the data is no longer a sequence of characters, but machine-processable and interoperable entities). This change can also mitigate some of the more onerous aspects of traditional authority control, reducing the need for manual labor. With the rise of online name authority databases such as the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) or Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), a work organization that uniquely describes the entity using URIs will allow a control authorities through an interconnected network. However, the control of cooperative authorities has usually been little used by institutional repositories (IR). This is due, among other reasons, to the fact that there are no vocabularies for local authors or for internal authors (for example, thesis authors). This article explores the challenges and possibilities that bound data offers for name authority control in a particular IR, the Duke Digital Repository (DDR). The study sought to identify an appropriate external authority source for creating names, improving disambiguation and name control, and integrating the information into broader management initiatives. An important step was to evolve from authority files to author identifiers. For this, each profile was associated with a unique 16-digit identification number that would serve as the basis for a URI from which information about the researcher could be accessed. The RDF model was used to make the information public. Once a representative number had been drawn to test the system, it was shown that only 14% of the authors included in the database were members of Duke University. This proves that IRs must be prepared to collect information from external investigators. The work that this would entail is beyond the possibilities of an isolated institution. Therefore, it is necessary to use systems such as Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID), which allows collaborative identification. The use of linked data will also allow greater visibility of the information created in the institution itself, so that identifiers will not be limited to personal authorities.

Download.

Authority control rules

To control the linking of bibliographic headings and the correction of preferred terms using rules, you must have one of the following roles:

Cataloger
Catalog manager
Catalog Manager
Repository manager
General system administrator

Authority control rules give you more control over when to link bibliographic headings and when to skip. They also provide greater control over the preferred term correction process and the final results of the preferred term correction. A good example of how authority control can be managed can be accessed on the Exlibris Authority Control Rules configuration page.