Bibliographic Control and Authority Control from Paris Principles to the Present

Forty years ago, the ICCP in Paris laid the foundations of international co-operation in descriptive cataloging without explicitly speaking of authority control. Some of the factors in the evolution of authority control are the development of catalogs (from card catalog to local automation, to today’s OPAC on the Web) and services provided by libraries (from individual service to local users to system networks, to the World Wide Web), as well as international agreements on cataloging (from Paris Principles to the UBC programme, to the report on Mandatory Data Elements for Internationally Shared Resource Authority Records). This evolution progressed from the principle of uniform heading to the definition of authority entries and records, and from the responsibility of national bibliographic agencies for the form of the names of their own authors to be shared internationally to the concept of authorized equivalent heading. Some issues of the present state are the persisting differences among national rules and the aimof respecting both local culture and language and international readability. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]