(Controlled Vocabularies + Authority Files)*Software=Interoperability

All of this week’s readings demonstrated the apparent need for authority control as part of cataloguing best practices. The work of creating and maintaining authority files using controlled vocabularies or a thesaurus, as far as Gorman is concerned, is imperative for achieving 100% precision and 100% recall in information retrieval within large databases. However, not everyone is interested in achieving perfection and so the Dublin Core metadata terms, which offer the less than satisfactory results that Gorman describes when using free text to search the Web is sufficient.

It was also apparent that each type of community, be it a library, archive or museum, has its own unique cataloguing requirements for bibliographic records to satisfy their unique user needs. Salo’s piece on the quality of metadata harvesting tools in institutional repositories brought into focus the difficulty that uncontrolled names can produce in collocation of scholarly articles for a chosen author. Salo lays the blame at two very different door-steps. One of the problems is the lack of standardization in institutional repository metadata that does not use authority control mechanisms and the other is software design that does not help facilitate the resolution of authority problems.

I could not find the reading listed in the syllabus, Lanzi, E. (1998). Standards: What role do they play? What, why and how of vocabularies. In Introduction to Vocabularies: Enhancing Access to Cultural Heritage Information, ed. E. Lanzi. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Information Institute, pp. 8-27, but I did find another piece on controlled vocabularies from the Getty Information Institute that made a strong argument for the use of community oriented vocabulary in conjunction with authority files for better retrieval. Tillett mentioned one of the Getty’s thesauri, Union List of Artists Names that the museum uses to control the name variations of an entity. Increasing precision and recall for a non-expert searcher at the Getty is handled by a software interface that uses the controlled lists to suggest terms for the individual to use. The same sort of program is used in a Google search.

Authority control is only part of the solution. Software programing that increases interoperability is another part. Together they will decrease the reality of the quip “Garbage In-Garbage Out”.