Survey
Authority Control for Digital Collections Survey
Responses to this survey were collected on June 14, 2016 at the Mountain West Digital Library Digitization Committee Meeting and on June 25, 2016 at the ALA ALCTS Linked Library Data Interest Group Meeting.
Other responses included Vendor, Federal, National Library, Government, State Library.
Other responses included DigitalCommons, Fedora, ArchivesSpace, SOBEK, OJS, Shared Shelf, ATOM database, and Knowvation.
Other responses included VIVO-ISF, RDF, plus ryox patch, RIS, DDI, FGDC, VRA Core, and EAD.
Other responses included MeSH, Geonames, LCSH geographic, local, Getty, and GRID.
5. What problems or issues do you have with authority control for personal and corporate names in non-MARC formats at your institution?
This was a free text question and answers have not yet been analyzed/deduplicated/categorized.
1. A lot of Marc records in Worldcat have been converted to the linked data. We are using OCLC systems. But most of students' dissertations' authors cannot be found in the authority files.
2. Common names get mixed up with no disambiguation.
3. Compatibility with MARC
4. Coordinating authority control across depts (tech svcs and special collections)
5. Depends on the platform used; we are trying to provide consistent form of names
6. find a powerful management tool for authority control
7. Inconsistency
8. Inconsistent staff decisions
9. Keeping our authority file current -- we don't have funds to outsource authority refresh or enough staff to do it in house
10. Lack authority files
11. Lack of adoption for people to identify themselves
12. Lack of smaller, locally-relevant, names in vocabularies
13. Local names need to be controlled; need to talk to the university knowledge management; different opinions among librarians
14. Mosty graduate student name disambiguation
15. No decent centralized way to standardize name controlled vocabularies - especially when trying to standardize them with our archives colleagues.
16. No global updates to bib records when authority changes
17. No linking from data and undergraduate authors
18. Not actually used much since our digital collections are from mass digitization, so even 50 collections represent about 50 corporate names as creators (i.e. no additional metadata below the collection level).
19. Not many problems because we apply our print practices to our digital collections for authority management.
20. Not working directly with this
21. Other stakeholders not understanding the need for authority control
22. Providing automated authority control in locally developed system.
23. Sharing our local authorities
24. Sheer numbers
25. So many names, so little time! 4000 finding aids, and likely thousands more names. Lots of legacy name entry as well.
26. Teaching non catalogers how to create the form of the name in "authorized" format; corporate names we are finding issues with ISSN, GRID, VIAF and NAF with dirty names, conflicts, duplicative and confusing results
27. the lack of links between dspace and extern authority files
28. This does not work well in current state. No good way to keep current.
29. Time-consuming; not necessarily handled by cataloging/metadata staff
30. too many name forms for same entity without any collocation
31. Variant names aren't linked.
32. We control the names of our people that deposit by allowing the use of controlled list that comes from the HR data feed. They have a chance to add the professional name in the HR and if that is their preferred name we use that one. Same for department names and organization names.
33. we don't do it consistently!
34. We don't use any.
35. We establish a controlled vocabulary for digital projects, our finding aids have their own authorities. We need to have one source of authority control.
36. What to do with names not available in LCNAF