Transcript of Questions and Answers for Karen Calhoun

James Bass:

[Could you say something about globalization of the name and subject authority files, or efforts in that direction?] In other fields, international trade for example, there are thousands of classifications for watches alone, all of which are quite uniform and understood around the world, but that had to start with an authority as high as the United Nations. Would that be too high an authority? If one reads through the TAXACOM Listserv for instance, occasionally questions of cultural imperialism raise their head.

 

Karen Calhoun:

In taxonomy they use Latin, and that helps a lot.

 

James Bass:

But then again, the further east one gets, it gets more questionable as to whether or not there would be much uniformity. Do you think that perhaps just limiting it to the continental level would be useful? I would think that UNESCO would be a logical place to start. Has there been any discussion at that level?

 

Karen Calhoun:

Yes, the International Federation of Library Associations, IFLA, has a number of committees that are working on this problem of trying to globalize the authority files. One model that was tried was assigning a control number to a name that could then be shared -- this is the heading for that entity -- and the heading could be different, like Giovani, or John, for the Pope; Brasil (with an "s") or Brazil (with a "z") -- and controlling the concept with a number. In addition to that some investigation was done in actually getting agreement on a form of name for:  an artist, like Leonardo Da Vinci; medieval authors, like Chaucer, or characters, like Beowulf -- those kinds of names that are different in different cultures. The idea was to have an agreement on the form of the name that would be used in library catalogs around the world. That didn't fly. So now, the library community is working on what they're calling access control, rather than authority control. In other words, you allow multiple authorized forms of a heading, depending on the cultural and historical conventions of the library users who want to have access to that information. So it's what I was kind of getting at where we need to look at our data structures and the way we do things so that we don't limit ourselves culturally and historically, that we're able to scale it up. I think that the investigation of access control has a great deal of promise -- not legislating a certain form of a name, but allowing multiple forms of names to be linked together somehow.

 

Laurel Jizba:

Karen, could you explain a little bit about the economics of the systems, in terms of the credits that are given and the costs?

 

Karen Calhoun:

Yes, I'd like to say that I agree with Bob [Poole] ...what he had to say about the economics of this. The authority file is a supporting file. It doesn't generate revenue on it's own. The cataloging networks get the money to recover the costs of creating these systems and record exchange methods, and the programming that goes into creating an interface so that catalogers can contribute their records. The cataloging networks get all that from their cataloging operations, and even more importantly from the searching that both libraries and end-users of libraries do of these massive bibliographic files of catalog records. That's where the money comes from. They would not be able to do it if the authority file was the only file they had. More specifically, the way it works in OCLC, when a cataloger creates a new catalog record and contributes it to the database, the cataloger's institution gets a credit. They get charged for searching, they get credits for new records. It isn't nearly as much as the cataloger's institution needs to actually recover the cost of creating that record. One of these library catalog records easily costs about $40 or more to create, when you consider the labor, benefits and overhead. The credit is somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.50 to $3.75. It's not nearly enough to cover the costs, but it's something and the institution gets a lot of free searches out of that. The authority file searching is free -- there's no charge for that. Did you want me to say more about that? [...] There is no credit for contributing an authority file record, that's correct, only for the contribution of catalog records. The other major network, the Research Libraries Group, is considering incentives of this type, but it's something that the cataloging networks, OCLC and RLG, get asked about continually. The idea for OCLC -- the principle -- is called contribution pricing. If you take from the database, if you're a net taker, you pay; if you are a net contributor, you actually end up with something of a credit at the end of the year. There are number of libraries that are in that situation at OCLC.