Introduction to Authority Control

Authority Control is a foundational concept in cataloging and bibliographic access. The goal of authority control is to improve precision and recall in searching so that researchers can retrieve all the results for a particular author, title, or subject, without including anything unrelated.

This video tutorial, Introduction to Authority Control, is an introduction to the terms and concepts associated with authority control. It describes the relationship between authority control, descriptive cataloging, and classification, and discusses the role of authority control in the modern computing age.

This video is the seventh in the ongoing Cataloging Fundamentals video series, one component of the Cataloging Fundamentals Program. If you have ideas for a future video or about how to support new catalogers in Colorado, please drop me a line at hitchner_a@cde.state.co.us.