Knowledge Bank

As more libraries acquire online catalogs, the interest and attention given to automated authority control continues to increase. Baer and Johnson recently did a survey of the authority control literature produced since 1974. They found that most of it (some seventy references) did not support the idea that advanced computer-searching capabilities are making authority control less necessary in online catalogs. In addition, their survey of the uses of authority control in American college and university libraries inspired "a number of comments to the effect that maintaining authority control online was just as time-consuming as maintaining authority control manually."(1). If automation has not made authority control unnecessary or even less time-consuming, what has it done in this area? Baer and Johnson express the hope that automation has enabled libraries to provide better authority control even if it has not allowed them to save time.(2). Such has been the case at the Ohio State University Libraries (OSUL). What follows is a description of how automation has recently been used to improve authority control of subject headings in the online catalog