Transcript of Questions and Answers for John Riemer

Gary Rosenberg:

I was wondering to what degree these authority structures are pulled in when you do a computerized search. Do they automatically give you the cross references and related subjects or is it more as guidance for someone as they build a search?

John Riemer:

Increasing numbers of online library catalogs integrate authority-file references amongst the browsable headings that are tied to bibliographic records. In those institutions where authority records and their references currently amount to no more than auxiliary guidance for performing a search, that integration is usually considered a desirable feature to be had in future upgrades to the system. Some of the displays you saw today I generated by doing a compressed personal name-key search in the Library of Congress system. There I was presented with the authority record sorting first, preceding an alphabetized sequence of the related bibliographic records.

Gail Hodge:

This is just a comment. We focussed on bibliographic records today, but in fact, the MARC cataloging rules are used often for a variety of different kinds of things. They can certainly be used for all types of AV materials and so forth, but also for almost anything. There are lots of examples of how MARC has been used as a standard transmission format—such as community or public service type information the library may have. So it really is a broad standard and its primary mission is to serve as a transmission, as an exchange, device. So often you'll find that in individual library systems the storage is not precisely the way that you see it, but the system can always can import and export in this format. I think that's key to the way that different kinds of authority file systems can be developed—that they can be optimized for their own internal processing, but for exchange you may want something that is a bit more rigorous, even if it makes you a little stoney-eyed.