No. 119, May 2001

The Current Status of Authority Control of Author Names
in the National Diet Library

by YOKOYAMA Yukio 
Book Processing Division, Books Department, 
National Diet Library, Japan

1. NDL Cataloging distribution
2. Authority control procedure
3. JAPAN/MARC(A) - Authority file
4. Chinese/Korean Name Authority record
5. Problems in the future

1. NDL Cataloging distribution
Since its foundation in 1948, the NDL distributed bibliographic data principally in printed form. However, there has been a shift recently from the printed form to the machine-readable form in the distribution of bibliographic and authority data. The Library ceased its distribution service of printed catalog cards in March 1998. Of the machine-readable form, the number of users of the CD-ROM version is greater than those using MT (magnetic tape), because the CD-ROM requires a personal computer only. 

In March 2000, the NDL started to provide bibliographic data on the NDL Web-site, which is called 'Web-OPAC'. Through the system, many ordinary people directly access the bibliographic data we have created, in addition to librarians and researchers. Now we are developing the next OPAC system, and the bibliographic data of the Japanese Periodicals Index, rare books, maps and dissertations will also be available on that system in FY2002. 

The NDL distributes the bibliographic and the authority data as follows: 

Table 1 

2. Authority control procedure

a. Materials covered
In the NDL, authority control of authors' names covers only three kinds of materials: Japanese-language books, western-language books, and Asian materials. Methods of authority control vary from collection to collection. They are treated by different catalogers of different divisions, and the cataloging rules and manuals are also different. 

Table 2: 

NCR: Nippon Cataloging Rules 
AACR: Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 
*1 When the original spelling is unknown/uncertain for a western personal name, romanized data is created from kana data. 
*2 Exception: a part of corporate body names. 
*3 This rule is applied to the data created after 1998. 
*4 Personal/corporate body names for Chinese/Korean authors only.

b. Procedure
Our authority work takes three forms, according to how far the authority control goes. 

Type 1 
In the first type or stage, the authority file does not exist and the authority work is done using the card author catalog for staff. This method was used until 1986 for western-language books, cataloged with AACR or AACR2, which use an author name as a main entry in a bibliographic record. Cataloging work was done smoothly without a name authority file, because the card catalog was arranged by author name, and looking up the old data of the same author was easy. Only reference cards were needed. 

Type 2 
The second way is to maintain authority files in card form. This method was used until the middle of the 1990s for Japanese-language books, and is still used for Asian materials. On the card, the data of Heading, See Reference, See Also Reference, Note, and Resource Citation on which the heading was first created are recorded. However, authority record and bibliographic data were not linked, and maintenance of headings of bibliographic data, for example, correction of headings, was difficult. 

Type 3 
The third stage of our authority work is to create the authority data in machine-readable form, linked with bibliographic data to make the maintenance of headings easy. Bibliographic data in JAPAN/MARC(M) are controlled by this procedure. 

In this system, when the cataloger inputs the new bibliographic data online, an automatic retrieval of the authority file by the batch process is done at the same time; then the cataloger can choose the appropriate heading for the items from the output list of matching data. If there is no authority record in the file, the cataloger inputs a new authority record online or by the batch process. 

This system is a subsystem of the 'Online cataloging system for Japanese-language books', which has been operating at full scale since May 1999. In the system, record ID numbers of authority data are embedded in headings of bibliographic records. So, when a change occurs in an authority record, the change will be quickly reflected in the corresponding bibliographic data. The revision work is merely to indicate re-linkage, which is done automatically. 

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