Authority control is the process of selecting one form of name or title from among available choices and recording it, the alternatives, and the data sources used in the process. It is essential for effective retrieval of resources. It provides consistency in the form of access points used to identify persons, corporate bodies, and works. Authority control is central to the organization for information.
The Authority Control Team is responsible for authority maintenance work for the University of Illinois online catalog.
The Authority Control Team focuses on fixing estimated over 1,000,000 incorrect personal names, corporate names, series titles, and subject headings in our bibliographic records (not including rare books records) in the library catalog.
The following is the workflow of fixing incorrect person names, corporate names, series titles, and subject headings in our bibliographic records in our library catalog.
Requests: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests/
PyZ3950: https://github.com/Brown-University-Library/PyZ3950
Pymarc: https://github.com/edsu/pymarc
Ply (Windows only): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ply/
73.68% of incorrect personal and corporate names in our online catalog have been corrected by computer. They are in MARC, which CARLI needs to upload them to Voyager. The remaining 26.32% of personal and corporate names need to be manually corrected. Our precaution is necessary because our catalog is comprehensive.
| Bib Record No. | Total | Automatically Changed | Need Manual Correction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 - 1 million | 79,091 | 63,783 | 15,308 |
| 1 - 2 million | 77,073 | 60,869 | 16,204 |
| 2 - 3 million | 65,512 | 50,427 | 15,085 |
| 3 - 4 million | 62,124 | 46,572 | 15,552 |
| 4 - 5 million | 40,843 | 28,390 | 12,453 |
| 5 - 6 million | 27,994 | 17,788 | 10,206 |
| 6 - 7 million | 34,971 | 23,184 | 11,787 |
| 7 - 8 million | 12,378 | 3,696 | 8,682 |
| Total | 399,986 | 294,709(73.68%) | 105,277(26.32%) |
