NACO: A Cooperative Model for Building and Maintaining a Shared Name Authority Database

The Name Authority Cooperative (NACO), founded in 1976, now encompasses some 395 institutions that have collectively developed and maintained a database of more than 2,000,000 authority records in addition to the more than 3,500,000 records created by Library of Congress staff. The NACO family of libraries is expanding at a rate of about 50 new members annually. The membership includes institutions from all but four of the 50 U.S. states and 43 institutions in 16 countries within Europe, Africa, Oceania, Asia, and Latin America. The NACO model has changed over time to create more cost-effective and user-friendly policies and procedures to meet participants’ needs. Increased recognition, especially by library administrators, of the value of authority control also encouraged NACO to flourish. This presentation explains membership requirements, benefits to the participants, as well as the role of the Library of Congress which serves as secretariat to NACOand oversees a variety of training and documentation activities to support program operations. One of NACO’s unique features–the opportunity to participate via a “Funnel Project” in which a group of institutions band together–is also described. Internationally, as the trendtowards adopting AACR and MARC 21 increases, the number of NACO partners outside the U.S. also increases. For countries where other standards prevail or where English is not the official language, NACO can serve as a model framework for a national program to consider while awaiting longer-term development of a more global approach to authority control.