Organisation and Maintenance of Library Authority Files in Russia and Abroad

Abstract

The article provides review of foreign and domestic publications on the problems of creation, development and use of authority files (AF) of names of persons, names of organizations, geographical names and other objects both at the international, national and regional levels. The paper presents analysis of the foreign experience of AF maintenance. The authors note that, due to the availability of universal collections and qualified specialists, AF formation abroad is usually carried out by national libraries. A substantive analysis of foreign publications has shown that national AFs (NAF) are characterized by data variability and diversity of approaches. The authors studied the experience of successful combination of NAF created according to different methods within the framework of the international corporate project — Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). The article notes that most of the Russian libraries do not use AF, since AF, created in republican and regional scientific libraries, as a rule, are not publicly available. At the same time, creation by a separate library of its own AF leads to high labour and material costs, and the formation of a large number of AF leads to the variability of the AFs created for the same objects. The authors conclude that for efficient use of AFs within the country, it is necessary to apply unified methods and rules for creation of authority records. Another way out is the application of the Semantic Web technology, which allows linking AFs created according to different methods. It is necessary to make maximum use of existing dictionaries or create dictionaries based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards.