Name Authority Control Evaluation

Name authority control evaluation is the systematic assessment of how well a name authority file fulfils its core task: gathering everything by or about a given person, family, or corporate body under one controlled access point, while keeping distinct identities apart. The IFLA Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) model supplies the conceptual yardstick, defining the entities authority data describes and the user tasks — find, identify, contextualize, and justify — that authority control must support. Elaine Svenonius's analysis of the cataloguing objectives explains why collocation and disambiguation are the heart of the matter. Evaluation samples access points, measures collocation (are all of an identity's works gathered?) and disambiguation (are unlike identities kept separate?), and audits the quality of the authority records themselves against FRAD's requirements.