Authority file
Documentation of the authorized form of names or subject headings used in a catalog, bibliography, inventory, or database. Authority control is a term used in library and information science (LIS) to describe the practice of ensuring that any term used as a catalogue entry is correlated with all other forms of that term.
"An authority file is similar to a synonym ring, the only difference being that it consists of UF/USE relationships instead of synonym relationships. So in an authority file one term in each synonym ring is indicated as being the preferred term for that subject. " (Garshol, 2004)
Literature:
Craig, J. D. (1982). Series authority files: The Glasgow University Experience. Journal of Librarianship, 14(4), 289-296.
French, J. C.; Powell, A. L. & Schulman, E. (2000). Using clustering strategies for creating authority files. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(8), 774-786.
Garshol, L. M. (2004) Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic maps! Making sense of it all. Journal of Information Science, 30 (4). 378-391. Available online at: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2006). Authority control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_control
See also: Authority control (Core Concepts in LIS); Controlled vocabulary; Knowledge organization systems; Semantic tools
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 14-08-2006