Authority Control on the Web : 2000 presentation by Barbara Tillett

I have been reading the final version of a presentation that Barbara Tillett gave in Nov. 2000 to the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium. There is also a print version,  Proceedings of the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium (2001), 574 pages, ISBN 0-8444-1046-2.  I especially like her concept of “access control”:

This also gets to a point I’ve been pushing for a long time – that of “access control” instead of “authority control.” I still haven’t found another term to use for this concept, but the idea is to control collocation, so the library or the user can select the form of the controlled heading they want to see – the system could switch the display to the chosen form or a default form set by the library. Authority control pulls together all the various forms and relates entities in a way that leads the user to the desired materials and provides a big picture of what is available. With “access control” the same underlying authority records provide control, but the display form is user-selected.

Strides have been made in some areas since this presentation, particularly in the prototype of VIAF and the conceptual model for FRAD, but the library world still has a way to go in implementing her vision.

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