REPORTS FROM THE
2010 OLAC Biennial Conference
Macon, Georgia

Pre-Conference - Plenary Sessions - Workshops and Seminars - Poster Sessions - Scholarship Recipient's Report

NACO-AV FUNNEL TRAINING

Presented by
David Procházka
University of Akron
( reported by Christina Hennessey, Loyola Marymount University )

The NACO-AV funnel training pre-conference was a day-long training session for those catalogers who will be contributing AV-related name authority records to the NACO-AV funnel, a project of PCC. Library of Congress does not create name authority records for AV work, so the job has fallen to PCC/OCLC catalogers and their institutions. This training is not offered very often, and is usually a five-day class. David did an excellent job of condensing five days of material into a one-day course relevant to AV catalogers. All twelve attendees received a large binder with 500 pages of materials from the full NACO five-day class. Many attendees brought laptops to the class as well, which was useful when looking at the many online resources we consulted during the course, such as AACR2, LCRIs, MARC21 format for authority data, and DCM:Z1. All these resources can be found on the NACO page.

The session focused on name authority records (NARs) for personal and corporate names. We skipped the regular NACO training on geographic names, since they seldom come up much in AV name authority work, and uniform titles. We also focused on AACR2, rather than RDA. If and when RDA is implemented, we will have opportunities for future training on it then.

General guidelines on when to create a new NAR were discussed. Goals of NACO record creation are high-value, low effort. The LC/NACO authority file is a dynamic file that lives at LC, changing every 24 hours. Name authorities should be unique, but not exhaustive. The records should not be a biography or a history, but brief and pertinent. Focus on the work in hand and do not cruise the database for errors to fix!

To keep authority records consistent, we spent a lot of time in the training on how the proper names are chosen and normalized (to avoid duplicates), and on the proper format for the 670s that support the research we have done on the name authority. There is also a lot of trickiness with corporate body name authorities. They are handled differently if they are government or non-government, and whether they are a subordinate part of another corporation or not.

The class worked on exercises throughout the day to test our knowledge of what we had learned so far. All contributors trained in this class will be assigned a mentor that will review our ongoing name authority work until we achieve 95% success. Approximately forty librarians internationally contribute to this project, listed in the NACO reports as the “OLAC” funnel. There are no quotas for the group or for particular librarians or institutions. The NACO-AV funnel is also supported by a discussion list.