Authority control - quality assurance of electronic union catalog

Abstract

Authority control provides consistency and uniformity of access points in the bibliographic database. The paper reveals the importance of authority control for the shared cataloguing and for the effective searching in LibUnivCatalog - the union catalog of university libraries of Moldova. Improving the local authority files is a top priority for cataloging librarians. This article presents the methods for disambiguating authors with the same name and for collocating the works of authors who use multiple names. It also reflects the problem of the univocal document content representation by using authorized subject headings linked by cross-references, including multilingual approach, in order to extend the possibilities of retrieving information in the library database. Sharing the responsibility of authority files maintenance and performing authority control enable libraries to save efforts and time for cataloguing and to improve the quality of the electronic catalogues.