n. (abbr. LCNAF)a compilation of authority records for personal, corporate, and particular family names maintained by the Library of CongressMichelson 1987, 193Information sharing through bibliographic utilities involved tradeoffs, however; joining these systems meant adopting system standards, which led to some fairly predictable problems for archival repositories. For example, because there were few archival descriptive standards suitable for an automated environment, repositories, in order to automate quickly, had little recourse but to accept the library conventions used by bibliographic utilities—such as Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition (AACR2), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF). As a result, library cataloging largely supplanted customary archival description in preparing the automated record at this early stage of archivists’ work.Schaefer and Bunde 2013, 44The Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) is a data value standard maintained by the Library of Congress. Libraries that are members of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) contribute to it, and submissions are described according to a set of standards mandated by the Library of Congress.LoC 2017Under AACR2, family names could not be established in the name authority file because they could not be descriptive access points. RDA permits family names to be used as descriptive access points if the family is credited with the creation of a work. They may therefore be established in the name authority file. ¶ A heading needed for use as a subject should be established in LCSH and tagged 100. Once established, the heading is used for works about all families with that name and is not specific to a particular family in a particular place or time. ¶ A heading needed for use as an RDA descriptive access point should be established in the name authority file and also tagged 100. The descriptive heading will include a note in a 667 field that indicates that it may not be assigned as a subject heading and field 008/15 (Heading use-subject added entry) will have a value of b: Not appropriate.Sweetser and Orchard 2019, 355Respondents were then asked to select the types of archival authorities and controlled vocabularies used in their archival description records. As indicated in Table 13, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) are most frequently used for describing authority records.LoC 2021bThe Library of Congress Name Authority File (NAF) file provides authoritative data for names of persons, organizations, events, places, and titles. Its purpose is the identification of these entities and, through the use of such controlled vocabulary, to provide uniform access to bibliographic resources. Names descriptions also provide access to a controlled form of name through references from unused forms, e.g. a search under: Snodgrass, Quintus Curtius, 1835-1910 will lead users to the authoritative name for Mark Twain, which is, “Twain, Mark, 1835-1910.”
Notes
For inclusion in the Library of Congress Name Authority File, particular family names must be specific to a place or time. Generic family names are maintained in the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
