Authorities & Controlled Vocabularies

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“A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user.”

What Is A Controlled Vocabulary? by Fred Leise, Karl Fast, Mike Steckel

This page is intended to provide links to information about various authority lists and controlled vocabularies. This is very far from exhaustive list, and many thesauri, taxonomies that are commonly used by archivists and other information professional surely absent. Send a message to this site's maintainer if you know of something that you use, or that you feel should be included.

On this page there is obviously some overlap with other standards, so please be sure to check out "standards" at this site.

Art and Architecture Theasurus: http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/

Bibliographic Formats and Standards is a guide to machine-readable cataloging records in WorldCat (the OCLC® Online Union Catalog). It provides tagging conventions, input standards and guidelines for entering information into WorldCat.

Library of Congress Authorities Search: http://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations; and download authority records in MARC format for use in a local library system. This service is offered free of charge.

Bibliographic Formats and Standards from OCLC: http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/default.htm

The Art & Architecture Thesaurus ® (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names ® (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN) are structured vocabularies that can be used to improve access to information about art, architecture, and material culture.

MARC Value List for Genre Terms: http://www.loc.gov/marc/sourcecode/genre/genrelist.html

This list includes terms that describe general categories, or genres that may be applied to various types of information resources. It has been compiled from controlled lists of values in various data elements in the MARC 21 bibliographic format. In some cases there are slight revisions to the term (e.g. "Updating Web site" in 008/21CR is listed as "Web site" to be more generic; "essays" in 008/33BK is listed as "essay" to agree with other values).

Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II (Genre and Physical Characteristic Terms)-- TGM II: http://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

A thesaurus of more than 650 terms for types of photographs, prints, design drawings, and other pictorial materials.

MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/

This document contains lists of codes intended for use in MARC 21 Authority, Bibliographic, Classification, Community Information, and Holdings records. The lists contain over 500 discrete codes, several of which are obsolete. Some codes may appear in more than one list. The document is arranged for use in seven main parts; a brief description of these parts follows.