Authority control: definitions, processes and components

• Grant number: 10/07477-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2010
• End date: December 31, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Information Science - Library and Information Science
• Principal Investigator: Plácida Leopoldina Ventura Amorim da Costa Santos
• Grantee: Fabrício Silva Assumpção
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Descriptive cataloging, understood as the recording of descriptive data about information resources, has as a product the catalog, a communication channel between user and collection. One of the objectives of the catalog is to show to the user all the resources associated with a particular person, family or corporate body. This objective requires the existence of the activities of name authority control, which let it control the names that are used to represent an entity. The achievement of such activities happen through the application of descriptive cataloging rules and it results in the creation of data, records and authority files. The conceptual model for authority data (FRAD) has in his proposal to provide an understanding of how the authority data operate and what are their relationships with the catalog. The new set of descriptive cataloging rules (RDA) will provide guidelines and instructions for the recording of data authority. Through bibliographical and documental research, with descriptive and exploratory character, it has as objective to approach the concept of name authority control and their importance and achievement in the process of descriptive cataloging, and to show the FRAD and RDA as instruments that can provide better quality to name authority control activities. It is hoped that the results of this research provide subsidies to perform name authority control activities and contribute to the theoretical body of descriptive cataloging.