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LC Rules!
posted 04/07/03
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word authority means "the power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge; power assigned to another; authorization." In the world of libraries, though, it means something a little different. For the purposes of cataloging, an authority record is a tool used by librarians to establish forms of names, titles, and subjects used on bibliographic records. "Authority records enable librarians to provide uniform access to materials in library catalogs and to provide clear identification of authors and subject headings," states the Library of Congress Authorities Web site. You may have had the frustrating experience of trying to search a library catalog by "Subject Heading," only to find that the subject you are looking for doesn't exist. This is usually because the library's Subject Headings come from an authority list like the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH for short). These lists have been in use for many decades, since before the days of keyword searching of documents. The advantage of using subject searching instead of keyword searching is that different people may use, for example, the words movies, motion pictures, cinema, or films to describe the same concept. A uniform subject heading assembles all these terms under the single heading "motion pictures." This allows the searcher to find all the materials on this topic without having to think of all the synonyms. One disadvantage of the system is that sometimes terms get outmoded. My favorite example is the word cookbooks. You will not find an authority record for that term in LC; if you search in the Subject Headings for, say, Asian cookbooks, you will get no hits. This is because the authority term is "cookery," not cookbooks. You have to go to library school to find this out. LC Rules! The bottom line is: don't get frustrated! We try to make the library as self-serve as possible, but the system sometimes doesn't work as well as we'd like. The library staff is here to fill in those gaps. Let us help!
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