From Library Authority Control to Network Authoritative Metadata Sources

Authority control is a quite recent term in the long history of cataloguing, although the underlying principle is among the very early principles of bibliographic control. Bibliographic control is a field in transformation by the rapid expansion of the WWW, which has brought new problems to information discovery and retrieval, creating new challenges and requirements in information management. In a comprehensive approach, authority control is presented as one of the most promising library activities in this respect. The evolution of work methods and standards for the sharing of authority files is reviewed, showing the imbalance in developments and practical achievements between name and subject authority, in an international perspective. The need to improve the network availability and usability of authority information assets in more effective and holistic ways is underlined; and a new philosophy and scope is proposed for library authority work, based on the primacy of the linking function of authority data, and by expanding the finding, relating and informing functions of authority records. Some of these aspects are being addressed in several projects dealing with knowledge organization systems, notably to cope with multilingual needs and to enable semantic interoperability among different systems. Library practice itself should evolve in the same direction, thereby providing practical experience to inform new or improved principles and standards for authority work, while contributing to enhance local information services and to promote their involvement in the WWW environment