Authority Control Model, Policies, and Processes
Scope: This set of documents reflect current policies and practices for authority control.
Contact: Dennis Christman or Rich Murray (Authority Control Group, co-leads)
Unit: Metadata Systems & Initiatives and Resource Description
Date last created: 12/5/2025
Date of next review: 6/5/2026
Summary
Resource description makes sense of the scale of library collections and enables library users to focus on research or other information needs. Authority control exists within the resource description ecosystem but goes further. At its core, authority control works to bring together similar resources published across time. Authority control achieves this by establishing and managing “entities” —whether those are people, places, subjects, etc.— in internationally shared authority files, and each with a persistent unique identifier. Wherever an entity appears in a bibliographic record, be it a library catalog, WorldCat, or other types of discovery systems, the unique identifier allows library users to leverage the persistent link to find related works. Catalogers contribute and maintain authority records, but due to the scale of library resources and associated entities automated processes are also necessary to ensure that all entities in bibliographic records match the latest authorized access point in authority records. This data flow is modeled in the diagram below.
