Name authority control in an evolving landscape By Dr Hester Marais maraih@unisa.ac.za

Authority control Authority control is the practice of creating and maintaining headings for bibliographic material in a catalogue.

Authority control functions Uniquely identify Bring material together Authority control fulfills two important functions. First, it enables catalogers to disambiguate items with similar or identical headings. For example, two authors who happen to have published under the same name can be distinguished from each other by adding middle initials, birth and/or death (or flourished, if these are unknown) dates, or a descriptive epithet to the heading of one (or both) authors. Second, authority control is used by catalogers to collocate materials that logically belong together, although they present themselves differently. For example, authority records are used to establish "uniform titles," which can collocate all versions of a given work together even when they are issued under different titles.

Uniquely identify a person Uniquely identify a person. RDA changed the landscape of authority control. In AACR2 the aim was a unique heading – RDA asked for a unique person. That is why this authority record is not acceptable in the RDA landscape – it represents more than one person.

Second function is to bring material that belongs together. Michael Crichton also wrote as Jeffrey Hudson. And he wrote books in collaboration with Michael Douglas. As a reader, you will probably enjoy those books as well.

Identity management Identity management is the process of identifying and authenticating a person New kid on the block. Identity management is the process of identifying, authenticating an individual or group of individuals. It started as an application or system in the IT environment. It is an information security domain that deals with the administrative tasks and processes of validating the identity and controlling the access of individuals/users for hardware or software. Are more and more use as a term to identify a person.

Name identifier systems An authority record with a unique heading is one way to identify a person. For researchers and lecturers, visibility are very important, because their research output influence their funding.

International Standard Name Identifier ISNI is an ISO standard for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content It is a tool for disambiguating names that might otherwise be confused, and will link data about names that is collected and used in all sectors of the media industries ISNI is the ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more. The mission of the ISNI International Authority (ISNI-IA) is to assign to the public name(s) of a researcher, inventor, writer, artist, performer, publisher, etc. a persistent unique identifying number in order to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery; and diffuse each assigned ISNIacross all repertoires in the global supply chain so that every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever that work is described. By achieving these goals the ISNI will act as a bridge identifier across multiple domains and become a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications..

Background: When the MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) format was initially developed in the 1960s, the resulting records carried all the information needed to provide the traditional paragraph style display of bibliographic data including associated punctuation. As ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) punctuation was introduced into the cataloging rules in the 1970s, the punctuation used in MARC records changed to follow ISBD practice. During that time most libraries used card catalogs with the traditional paragraph structure to display bibliographic data. Consequently, the inclusion of punctuation in MARC records was considered beneficial and necessary. As libraries moved to the use of online systems to store and access catalog data, the display of bibliographic information also changed. Traditional displays of bibliographic information in paragraph form were discarded in favor of labeling parts of the bibliographic description. Yet, in MARC 21 punctuation needed for the traditional paragraph style display of bibliographic data remains as part of the information routinely input and carried in MARC records. MARC 21 documentation contains instructions on inputting punctuation and numerous examples illustrating fields with ISBD and other punctuation.

Virtual International Authority File The VIAF® (Virtual International Authority File) combines multiple name authority files into a single OCLC-hosted name authority service. The goal of the service is to lower the cost and increase the utility of library authority files by matching and linking widely-used authority files and making that information available on the Web.

Can go directly to a specific source.

More trustworthy

Summary: it is a case of horses for courses Summary: it is a case of horses for courses. Match the information and with the system best suited.

Does identity management spells the death of authority control?

No. It is possible to add identifiers on an authority record No. It is possible to add identifiers on an authority record. Eric Childress – authority record with his ISNI, ORCHID and VIAF identification numbers. Created by trained librarians. But it still does not fulfil the need of researchers.

Authority records are reliable and can be the basis for other identity management systems.