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Authority Work
All editors already do in-office authority work when confronted with documents with variants of an author's name. Emma Goldman, for example, wrote letters under various pseudonyms such as E. G. Colton, E. G. Smith, Emma Clausen, and E. G. Brady. Obviously in all these cases, "Emma Goldman" would be the authorized name form under which the document would be indexed. But what of another famous case, her lover and lecture tour manager, Ben L. Reitman? Should his name appear in an index as "Benjamin Lewis Reitman", "Benjamin L. Reitman", "Ben Lewis Reitman", "Ben Reitman", or "Ben L. Reitman"? If the name is taken directly from documents,
Authority work within the archival world expands this type of authorized control of name forms and subject headings beyond the confines of the office to archives across the country. Only with knowledge of authorized names and subjects can users search and retrieve information from a national on-line data base. But to make the system workable, all the archives must use the same common name form as well, or else users will have to somehow know all the variants and search them out, too—a time-consuming proposition.
As with MARC AMC, the Library of Congress has, by virtue of its size and commitment to being the national library, taken the lead in developing authority control for national computer networks. In 1975 the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science funded a study by Lawrence Buckland, The Role of the Library of Congress in the Evolving National Network, which led to the establishment of the Network Development Office (NDO) at the Library of Congress. NDO faced the task of computerizing what had been a manual process. The Library of Congress had for years maintained, in card file form, a name authority system of which the most publicly visible portion was the name forms in National Union Catalog. In 1974, the Library published some of this information in Name Headings With References. A batch automated system followed in 1977, which generated such things for distribution to libraries as authority cards and cumulative microfiche. Finally in the early 1980's, through the efforts of NDO and the MARC Editorial Division, the authorities went on-line in their own MARC AMC format.[12]
MARC AMC Authorities do not hold much promise for documentary editors seeking proper name forms for their editions. The Library of Congress enters authority name forms only for material currently being processed; retrospective authority records are updated only as they are used. Thus a new work with a historical person's name as author or as a subject will have to be published and catalogued by the Library for the name form to be updated. Since so many of the names that come up in documentary editions belong to relatively obscure people, the chances are that those forms would not be contained in the MARC Authorities data base, and if they were, they probably would have an incorrect pre-AACR2 form.
Nevertheless, editors should attempt to do as much authority work using the national system as possible. This could be as simple as checking name forms against the National Union Catalog—though it must be remembered that these entries will probably be in pre-AACR2 form. The best approach would be for editors associated with a university to arrange for the campus library to allow them access to one of the bibliographic utilities that carry MARC Authorities, such as OCLC.
No matter in what way editors may undertake this authority work, they will find that the authorized name sometimes is not the best form, according to their much more informed editorial judgment. Catalogues at whatever
Obviously, authority work adds a good deal of time to cataloging. For example, descriptive catalogers at the Library of Congress spend, according to one estimate, half their time in name authority work.[13] Since editors deal with a much more finite universe of names, it would probably be likely that efforts at achieving proper name forms might take only a maximum of one-quarter more processing staff time. As with most cataloging, the error rate runs very high; according to one study, if names occur more than ten times in a data base at least one error should be expected.[14]
The Goldman Papers approaches the issue of authority work in the following manner. All authors, recipients, and titles receive four-letter mnemonic codes. Names generally take, in order, the first two letters of the last name and the first two letters of the first (e.g., "goem" for Emma Goldman). Titles are coded using the first two letters of the first word, and the first letters of the next two important words. Living My Life, for example, takes the code "liml." When entering a document for the first time, processors, instead of entering the full name, attempt to input the four-letter code. The program seeks the code in the project's authority data base. If the program finds the code, it retrieves it and asks to verify the name. If not, the program prompts the user for new code; if so, the program writes the authorized name form directly to the record. If the program does not find the code in the authority files, the program gives the processor the opportunity to create a new entry in the name authorities file. Periodically, the microfilm editor reviews new entries for proper form.
The Goldman Papers system has several advantages for doing authority work. Since one entry creates all names in the main data base, variant forms do not occur. Eventually, the four-letter codes that appear in each record can be linked to any altered entries in the authority data base; hence if the forms the Goldman Papers uses differ from those of MARC Authorities, the MARC form can be entered in the authority data base to permit output in a form which allows for on-line searching.
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