Automation in Discovery: Authority Control and Beyond

Authority control is widely recognized as an important means of maintaining connections in a library’s catalog, collocating related names or subjects, disambiguating similar titles or creators, and optimizing these access points for patron searches. Automation that applies rules uniformly across your catalog, drawing on authorized terms from recognized databases, is the only practical means of propagating authority control throughout a large collection. But what else can an automation engine do? Where else can programmatic routines that search, match, and verify data points be applied? In this webinar, Casey Cheney, vice president of automation services at Backstage Library Works, explores the possibilities of automation in MARC and non-MARC databases. She discusses how Backstage has applied data-matching algorithms to a wide range of metadata cleanup and enrichment projects. She also walks attendees through Backstage’s core authority control processes and answers audience questions.