Problems in the Establishment of Nonunique Chinese Personal Headings with Special Reference to NACO Guidelines and Vendor-Supplied Authority Control

Abstract

Current vendor software for authority control is found to generate negative results for nonunique Chinese headings in the local catalog. After authority control, nonunique Chinese names in the bibliographic records are found routinely altered to match authority headings established in the Library of Congress (LC) authority file that are unrelated to the Chinese script of the bibliographic record. Headings with standard diacritics in the Wade-Giles romanization scheme are the most problematic. The name headings that are negatively affected in the authority control services need to be corrected before the LC Pinyin conversion project takes place around the year 2000 to prevent headings from being distorted further in the Pinyin conversion process. In this paper, I examine the reasons why vendor software produces negative results for nonunique Chinese names, and suggest measures for Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) libraries in North America and vendors who supply authority-control services that include CJK data to improve the situation. These include vendor software upgrades, modifications to CJK Name Authority Cooperative procedures, etc. The authority control service at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is used to illustrate the problem.