Page 140 - Cataloging and Classification for Library Technicians, 2nd Edition

126 Cataloging and Classification for Library Technicians
cat a log ing com pletely, both orig i nal and copy cat a log ing. The next
step is the processing of the cat aloged ma terials.

THE AUTHORITY FILE

The pur pose of cat aloging and hav ing a cat alog is so that us ers can
have easy ac cess to a well-organized col lection. The op timum use of
a cat alog de pends on au thentic en tries and a clean da tabase. This re-
quires that the name of a per son or or ganization that serves as an ac -
cess point ap pears in the same form, so that all the ma terials authored
by the same per son or cor porate body oc cur to gether on the screen or
are filed together in the same section of the cat alog. Establishing a list
of all the authoritative ac cess points is called au thor ity con trol. Ac -
cess points that need to have au thority con trol in clude name, se ries ti -
tles, and sub ject.
The guide lines to use for as signing au thority re cords are in a Li -
brary of Con gress pub li ca tion ti tled USMARC For mat for Au thority
Data. In this publication is the for mat of stan dard forms for names of
per sons and or ga ni za tions, se ries ti tles, uni form ti tles, and sub ject
terms used in bib liographic re cords. The cho sen forms as the au thori-
tative names were selected by the Li brary of Congress and the Name
Au thor ity Co op er a tive (NACO), which is com posed of li brary rep re-
sentatives who also con tribute to the authoritative name lists. The Li -
brary of Con gress books da tabase serves as the name authority file,
and the Library of Con gress Sub ject Head ings is the subject au thority
file that cat alogers should use. For on line cataloging in the MARC
format, fields 1XX, 7XX, and 4XX need to be checked against the
authority files to en sure proper us age.
Since au thor ity con trol is a time-con sum ing, la bor-in ten sive task,
many li braries, es pecially the au tomated ones, con tract this work out
to au thority ser vice ven dors. The au thority ser vice ven dor checks and
revises all the new head ings in the bib liographic re cords and pro vides
new au thority re cords for the li braries as well. In this case, ac cess
points no lon ger need to be checked in dividually and rou tinely by the
in-house cat alogers, and as a re sult, cat aloging can be done more
quickly.