About Authority Control

Authority control improves database searching by providing a controlled vocabulary to index together all the materials owned by the library on a particular subject, or in a particular series, or by a particular author.

Authority control further enhances searching by providing cross references from subject terms, series titles, and forms of names other than the "authorized" form.

Since many names are non-distinctive--e.g., John Smith--catalogers try to add distinguishing elements, such as birth and/or death dates, so that all the works by or about a particular author can be found under one consistent and unique form of name.

Catalogers who contribute full-level cataloging records to the OCLC bibliographic database are required to use authorized forms of names. Using OCLC's Connexion software, authorized forms of names and subjects can be linked to the authority file so that changes in the authority file automatically update the linked headings on bibliographic records.

NACO is the Name Authority COoperative Program of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging of the Library of Congress. FIU catalogers have been trained to add authority records to the NACO database. NACO participation will save us time because, when we create the authorized form of a name, we will not have to change our records to an authorized form that is created later by some other library. The authorized form will be the one we created in the first place.