Authors and Authorities in Post-RDA Library Systems: A Case Study

Persons are complex, and their representation in library authority records is becoming increasingly complex through the addition of attributes under RDA rules. This case study, using a longitudinal approach, examines attributes in authority records from the Merlin Cluster of academic libraries at both six months (i.e. September 2013) and one year (i.e. April 2014), after the official adoption of RDA to assess trends in attribute field usage. This study revealed that after one year of RDA cataloging,87.58 percent had no attributes at all, but that percentage was down -2.43% from the percentage at six months. Almost 8% of authority records had at least one attribute after a year; and almost 5% had two or more attributes. In terms of the attributes recorded, dates recorded in the 046 of authority records were the most common with 7.1 percent of records including them after six months of RDA cataloging and nearly 10 percent of authority records including them after one year of RDA. The 678 (Biographical or Historical Data) and the 375 (Gender) were the next most common attributes supplied. Overall, attributes supplied tend to be sparse and focus on English-speakers, males, and those associated with universities in some way. Although this analysis investigates the metadata quality indicator of completeness for attributes in post-RDA authority records, in the process of investigating aspects of the demographics of persons in the authority file, a few informal observations came forth.