Page 234 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese Edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2015 Vol.41 233

history in contemporary China, the Cultural Revolution, which had generated detrimental damages
to Chinese libraries; the fourth period, 1977-1989, under the influences of the market reform and
the implementation of the “Opening Up Policy”, the Chinese library services achieving rapid and
profound development; the fifth period, 1990-1999, Chinese libraries completing the transition
from traditional to modern library services; the sixth period, 2000-2009, Chinese libraries
experiencing unprecedented and prosperous development in this period.
The historical periodization for Chinese library development innovatively absorbed critical standards
and references used in the periodization of Chinese national history. Simultaneously, this periodization
is developed not only based on the features, characteristics and laws of library development, but also
through in-depth analysis of the annual development of Chinese libraries in history. Nevertheless,
this periodization methodology developed on paper requires further validation and verification.

Authority control for the Web

1 ∗
Wei LIU , Chunjing ZHANG & Cuijuan XIA

“Organizing and accessing all kinds of knowledge of mankind” is the ultimate goal for
bibliographic control. Authority control as the major means for bibliographic control, evolved with
library cataloguing at the very beginning. The collection of authority records called authority file
is one of MARC standard formats. Authority files play a vital role in the traditional library catalog
system. It refers to the preferred value of headings, and determines the precision ratio of retrieval,
and provides an authoritative reference for the future cataloging. In order to implement authority
control, there must be two elements: a set of cataloguing rules and a set of authority records which
are very essential. So the traditional authority control contains a set of rules and records to regulate
the title, creator and keywords and so on.
Many international organizations such as IFLA and national libraries have made great efforts
in bibliographic control for decades and invested enormous labors. A lot of large authority files
including millions of names and vocabularies have been published, which play a significant role in
organizing recorded knowledge. However, authority control has never accomplished the original
goal of“Organizing all the knowledge for the mankind”. There have been different nations with
different rules, and a lot of major attributes without authority controlled values. The defect of
manual work and the imperfection of catalogue rules are the main enemies. But the fundamental
cause of the flaws is that the technology at that time cannot provide the adequate support for the
purpose of authority control. The difficulties to achieve a strict consistency in implementing the
cataloging rules have been greatly underestimated.
The nature of authority control is to keep the consistency of bibliographic records. The

* Correspondence should be addressed to Wei LIU, Email: wliu@libnet.sh.cn, ORCID: 0000-0003-2663-7539