PaILS Project Title:  Authority Control 2019

What is Authority Control?  Here’s a page from Evergreen documentation that helps to begin to explain it.  It’s a significant detail for catalogers to understand.

Project Plan: A group of  community members with cataloging expertise and PaILS support staff will work with Equinox and Backstage to set up an Authority Control Profile.

Resources Needed:  Time of Community (accepted volunteers), Project Management Time, Leadership and Final Decision making approval, Online Meeting Space and Document storage, Place to Archive Project Results, Funds to pay Equinox and Backstage for data services provided.   These resources are committed.

Output Expected: Improved catalog accuracy through better understanding of Subject Authority rules that we can all agree upon.  This will make the next de-dup better and allow us to strategize to delete legacy records, much improved statewide searching through consistency and shorter lists.  I’m hopeful it will improve relevancy results of searches too.  This is a clean-up and analysis project.

Why are we doing this?  What is the expected change or outcome?  A better catalog for our customers and libraries to use when searching for items they want.

Timeline: This project was written to be completed by end of September 2019.  This was an expected plan to do this project on this timeline.

If you have questions about this project, the Cataloging listserv would be a great place to start a conversation.