Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Mean We Should: An Argument for Simplicity and Data Privacy With Name Authority Work in the Linked Data Environment

Abstract

Neutrality is a core tenet of librarianship, although it is widely accepted that cataloging is not a neutral act. In 1876, Charles Ammi Cutter outlined the model for a library catalog. That model remained largely unchanged for over 120 years; however the publication and adoption of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) by the international cataloging community in the late 1990s and early 2000s ushered in new models for organizing and describing bibliographic resources. Although the “FRBR Family” of models remains true to Cutter’s guiding principles at their core, they explicitly introduced specific attributes for describing bibliographic entity groups. In particular, FRAD greatly expanded the attributes to record about Persons, and these attributes were codified in the contemporary cataloging standard Resource Description and Access (RDA). As a result, catalogers now capture much more information about people in authority records than ever before. The contribution of all this new additional metadata into authority files has the potential to harm the actual people we are now cataloging by misidentifying or censoring information through cataloger bias or by capturing personally identifying information that could be used against the person. This has great ramifications in the linked data environment when the metadata is reused and can no longer be controlled by the individuals or institutions who created the original data. The risks are too great and we have yet to see the results in our discovery systems to rationalize adding so much personal information about people in library authority records. This paper argues that we should return to a simpler, pre-RDA authority record. However, the likelihood of changing RDA is slim, but we can adjust our cataloging practice to record only the most necessary information in authority records to curb catalog bias and insure personal data privacy for authors and contributors in our authority files.