Authorities Survey
Overview
The Authorities Survey project captures a view into current authorities practice at UT Libraries in order to develop metadata recommendations, guidelines, and policy.
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Recommendations
Sharing locally-created authorities across departments and consolidating the number of authorities used can help in solving consistency issues. Respondents noted that consistency, both internal within their own departmental practices and external across all of UTL, is the most desired change they would like to see from current practice.
Geographic and genre authorities are the most variable; these should be the first focus of any consolidation efforts
Coverage, accuracy, completeness, style, and familiarity are the main reasons provided by respondents on how they choose between authorities that are used for the same field. Discussing these shared principles with respondents could help in consolidation and more unified authorities guidance.
Some variation is expected due to the scope of some sites (DAMS, which had the most authorities represented) or due to the specificity of the content. Any consolidation or sharing will be nuanced to account for these factors.
To better facilitate metadata reuse or term-sharing, documentation for terms may need to be shared and take advantage of current common strategies (Google Drive and Box.)
Individuals surveyed noted that cleanup/migration, translation, and addressing harmful language present in authorities were the most important goals relating to authorities. The MSC should assist with these specific concerns.
Methods
A survey was sent to collection curators and repository managers in October 2023. Response collection ended in late January 2024, with analysis and editing of the final report taking place from February-June 2024. Survey questions included how respondents choose between similar authorities, what authorities they choose not to use, and any special projects or remediation taking place. Google spreadsheets and Tableau were utilized as tools for analysis to better understand authority usage patterns.
It is important to note that not all authorities used by a site are included in this dataset. For example, AILLA does make use of rights statements even though it is not mentioned in the survey data collected. These survey results reflect what metadata workers recalled at this point in time about the state of their authority usage and practice.
Sites reviewed:
Alma
Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN)
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA)
DAMS (including HRDI and Primeros Libros metadata)
GeoData Portal
Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI)
Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO)
Tape archive (including Box and network shares)
Texas Scholarworks (TSW)
Texas Data Repository (TDR)
Visual Resources Center (VRC)
Findings
Clicking the images within the findings below will take you to the Tableau Dashboard, where you can see a larger version and interact with the visualization.
What are the most common authorities? Least common?
Library of Congress authorities are used the most across UTL. However, these same authorities were mentioned by respondents as an authority they have problems with in implementation or would not use in some fields. Problems include the presence of harmful language in the authority, the use of multi-compound terms which can make browse search more difficult, and no multilingual availability.
Other commonly used authorities include AAT - 20 occurrences, VIAF - 16 occurrences, and Local vocabularies/translations - 10 occurrences.
The least common authorities are largely geographic ones, used only within the GeoData Portal.
What authorities are used in the DAMS?
The DAMS has the most variety of authorities out of any UTL repository or site, with 20 distinct ones used. This variety can be attributed to a number of factors, including the many partners/stakeholders that ingest into the DAMS, the diversity of materials represented in the site, and the large number of fields. 14 of these authorities are shared across different partners ingesting into the DAMS; two of them, LCSH and VIAF are used by all partners. However, shared use does not necessarily mean the same terms are being applied due to subject variation and different term preferences
By partner:
By authority:
What authorities are used in the GeoData Portal?
Nearly all of the authorities listed by respondents relate to geographic metadata. Other kinds of metadata and authorities are present in the GeoData Portal (languages, publishers, subjects, etc.), but these were not mentioned. Most of these geographic authorities are not shared in other UTL sites.