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• Authority Controls

Vernon Cataloguing

Authority Controls

The data in some fields is structured and predictable and can generally be reduced to an accepted vocabulary. There are, for example, only so many materials in the world of which an object can be made and only so many places within your institution where objects might be located.

Vernon CMS equips such fields with authority controls. Users have complete control over the content of all authorities. You create a word or phrase that will serve as the authority (i.e. the model) for how a particular word or phrase should be expressed, and thereafter when that word or phrase is entered in a field the system checks to make sure it matches the model or authority term.

The benefits of Vernon's Authority Controls and relational structure are many. They:

• save repeated keying of the same data
• prevent the entry of incorrect or variant data
• ensure that all references to a particular person, place, department, etc are identical and that searches are therefore thorough and comprehensive
• make maintenance of the system easier. There is only one record or model for each authority term so when you make a change to that single term (such as entering the date of death of an artist or correcting a spelling error) the change is immediately reflected throughout the system, for all records using that term
• economise on storage space. Because the details of an entity (such as a person or place) once created can be used any number of times, the system need not store this data for every occurrence of use

In addition, the structure of the authority files means that data is pooled and can be used repeatedly for diverse purposes. The biographical details of, say, George Washington, are entered only once and can then be shared between disciplines such as history or art and across functions such as registration, curation and conservation.

There are more than 200 authority files such as Place, Materials, Period, Classification, Location, etc. There are three different types of authorities -

• simple
• thesaural/ hierarchical
• complex

Why so many separate authority files? Because Vernon Systems users know what they want, and when they′re searching for objects made in China they don′t want the system to also return objects made of china.

You won't use them all, but when you have a need for vocabulary control and a relational structure it can be met. The separate authority files categorise terms into logical groupings, allowing you to be precise about what you want.

Simple Authority Files

 

Simple authority files allow the specification of terms, their codes and definitions, and provide simple lists of approved terms to select from.

Thesaural/Hierarchical Authority Files

 

Thesaurus facilities allow the definition of a term's relationship to other terms in the same authority. Broader, narrower, related, used-for, use-instead and translated terms can be defined. For example when a user in your institution enters 'Abyssinia' as the place made, the thesaurus will know that you have defined 'Ethiopia' as a use-instead term for Abyssinia and will automatically substitute the preferred term. Once you've defined the relationship between these terms, someone could still search for objects made in Abyssinia and the system would return objects made in Ethiopia.

Authority files with thesaurus functions are also hierarchical which allows you to categorise information to increasingly precise levels. The most obvious examples are the Place authority which can define places at the level of city, region, country, continent etc, or the Classification authority in which you can define multiple levels such as Chair/Seats & Footstools/Furniture/Decorative Arts.

Many types of information can be maintained all in the same hierarchical authority. For example institutions with collections of both art and natural sciences will probably want to maintain several different classification systems in the Classification authority.

ABOVE: A sample of the Classification Authority showing top terms for the Linnaean and Nomenclature classification systems. Nomenclature is 'expanded' to show its narrower terms. Each of these narrower terms, if expanded, would show its narrower and any other related terms.

Hierarchical authorities make retrieval easier and more comprehensive. You can, for example, simply retrieve ′Furniture′. The system has already recorded the fact that Furniture encompasses narrower terms such as Seats & Footstools, and that each of these encompasses still narrower terms such as Chair, Bench, etc and all these items can be returned as the results of a search for "Furniture".

Complex Authority Files

 

Complex authority files are significant databases in their own right. These are Person, Documentation, Event and Site.

The Art and Architecture Thesaurus and Revised Nomenclature are also available in COLLECTION format and can be integrated for an additional fee. Other external authorities such as ICONCLASS, TGN and ULAN can be loaded from electronic or printed sources.