Publisher Names in Bibliographic Data

Abstract

The cataloging community has long acknowledged the value of investing in authority control. As bibliographic systems become more global, the need for authority control becomes even more pressing. The publisher description area of the catalog record is notoriously difficult to control, yet often necessary for collection analysis and development. The research presented in this paper details a project to build a database of authorized names for major publishers worldwide. The authors used ISBN prefix data to cluster bibliographic records by publisher; the resulting database contains thousands of variant forms of each publisher's name and data about their publishing output. Profiles of four large publishers were compared. Each publisher's languages of publication, formats, and subjects demonstrated their distinctive publishing output and validated the record clusters.