2006

Authority Control IG "Questioning Authorities" pt. I: Tagging and Folksonomies

Questioning Authorities: Adapting Authority Control to the Changing Needs of Library Users. Presented by LITA/ALCTS CCS Authority Control Interest Group. June 25, 1:30 p.m. Large room, full-ish but not packed at the beginning. As usual with this IG, this is a long, intense program with quite varied presentations, so I will break into two entries. First three presentations on the agenda deal with user generated organization using vocabularies (tagging and folksonomies, a cool/hot topic); the Library of Congress’s update, given by Beecher Wiggins this time, on the Series Authority Decision and other matters (probably a late add to the program); issues of synchronization of romanized fields with vernacular language encoding in MARC 880 fields when headings are changed by an authority control vendor. These topics show some of the wide range of perspectives that the area of authorities and controlled vocabularies can take – from new insights into psychology, community…

2006

Authority Control IG "Questioning Authorities" pt. 2, "those pesky series": Synchronizing vernacular fields and LC update

Questioning Authorities: Adapting Authority Control to the Changing Needs of Library Users: LITA/ALCTS CCS Authority Control Interest Group (part 2) Manon Theroux, Authority Control Librarian at Yale, gave a thorough and deliberate presentation on the vernacular field authority control issue which was a bit of a relief to this note taker after trying to keep up with the fast-talking Mr. Singer. The issue involves changes made to headings (indexed access points) in records sent from an institution (in this case, Yale) to an authority control vendor (in this case, MARS from Backstage Library Works, whose Authority Control Product Manager John Reese followed Manon’s presentation with the vendor’s eye view) and the complexity introduced by parallel “romanized” and “vernacular” encoded fields for non-roman alphabet language controlled access points such as names, series and subjects. When the record contains “vernacular coding” so that languages in non-roman alphabets can be displayed, and in…