Heritage Authority Files
Wherever possible, the Heritage Library Management System provides lists of words or other types of data which are likely to be used more than once. These are known as authority lists and benefit the librarian by avoiding the need to duplicate effort (e.g. it is only necessary to type in 'Dickens, Charles' once) and also avoiding misspellings, different cases or unwanted synonyms. There are hundreds of examples of authority lists around the system, but the most commonly used are:- Series
- Keywords
- Publishers
- Authors
- Type of media
- Keywords
- Subjects
- Department
- Journal frequencies
- Locations
These authority lists are not just limited to cataloguing; there are many other areas where they prove invaluable, including borrower records where repeated entries of department would make for a great deal of typing and scope for inconsistencies.
Authority lists can usually be found 'behind' fields e.g. if the user was entering a catalogue record for the first time and the cursor is positioned in, say, the author field; a simple mouse click will reveal a list of all previously entered authors. This list can be quickly browsed and the author (if present) added to the current catalogue record. Authority lists are frequently built as you go avoiding the time consuming methods that some systems require.
The thesaurus is another example of an authority list where terms can be replaced automatically with other, preferred terms.
Examples of authority files
Authors
Corporate authors
Journal frequencies
