Off-Road Authority Control

Abstract

Projects such as the Library of Congress’ BIBFRAME initiative show that libraries are transitioning towards a linked data environment. In this Semantic Web world, everything must be disambiguated, meaning the importance of authority control’s role of pulling together and connecting persons, organizations, things, and topics will not only be retained but enhanced. Furthermore, the new cataloging guidelines encourage us to avoid creating undifferentiated authority records, the lumping together of two or more persons under the same name heading. These factors place an increased burden on catalogers to find information that uniquely identifies persons, especially birth/death dates and occupations. Fortunately, the treasure trove of data on the web means catalogers are no longer confined to searching traditional reference sources. This presentation will explore a variety of web resources that are useful in locating information to uniquely identify persons, including genealogical sources, obituaries, tombstone inscriptions, and local histories.