Differences Between Authority and Bibliographic Records

Difference Between Authority & Bibliographic Records

Simply put, the most apparent difference between an Authority record and a Bibliographic record is the presence or lack of a 245 Title Field.

Authority Record

The makeup of an authority record typically includes many of the same fields that a bibliographic record contains. However, one major difference is that the authority record will not contain a 245 field. In the authority record, the main entry is denoted by the presence of a 1XX field. There will only be one 1XX field within the authority record.

Examples of the types of 1XX fields present in an authority record are: 100, 110, 111, 130, 150, 151, 155 (as well as others [1]).

These 1XX fields within the authority record can be tied to the headings within the bibliographic records. Each 1XX field represents an authorized version of a particular heading.

In addition to 1XX fields, authority records may contain corresponding 4XX (See) or 5XX (See also) fields. These 4XX or 5XX fields act as older or variant forms of the main 1XX heading. They may contain alternate variations of the data in the 1XX or an older, but now obsolete version.

Example
	001	no2008079770
	100  1	$aQuintana Orsini, Carlos,$d1973-
	400  1	$aOrsini, Carlos Quintana,$d1973-
	400  1	$aQuintana O., Carlos,$d1973-

Note that the 400 fields are different variations of the main 100 field entry. This helps steer patrons to the correct form of the heading.

Bibliographic Record

A bibliographic record, on the other hand, should always contain a 245 field, which represents the cataloged form of the title that the bibliographic work is based on.

Example
	100  1	$aQuintana Orsini, Carlos,$d1973-
	245  13 $aLa capitalización boliviana :$b(1994-2005) /$cCarlos Quintana Orsini.

As you can see, in this case the 100 field in the bibliographic record represents the author of the work described in the 245 field.

Examples of the types of fields present in a bibliographic record are varied and many [2].

Correlation Between the Files

The main entry in an authority record (1XX field) can correlate with specific fields of the same type within the bibliographic record. For instance, a 100 field in an authority record can correspond to a 100, 600, 700 or 800 field in a bibliographic record. Or a 150 in an authority record can correspond to a 650 in a bibliographic record.

Since headings within bibliographic records are typically created by a cataloger, these headings may not always be as up-to-date or standardized as possible. Authority records, however, contain the most up-to-date main entry (1XX) with any variant forms or alternate spellings (4XX or 5XX) included as needed.

If a library had created a bibliographic record with the following main entry and title:

	100  1	$aOrsini, Carlos Quintana,$d1973-
	245  13 $aLa capitalización boliviana :$b(1994-2005) /$cCarlos Quintana Orsini.

Then the main entry within the bibliographic record (in this case, the 100 field) would not contain the most up-to-date form of the name heading. For that, we would need to find the right authority record that corresponds to this alternate form of the heading.

Based on what we saw with the example in the authority record section:

	001	no2008079770
	100  1	$aQuintana Orsini, Carlos,$d1973-
	400  1	$aOrsini, Carlos Quintana,$d1973-
	400  1	$aQuintana O., Carlos,$d1973-

We know that we could change our bibliographic main entry (100 field) to this instead:

	100  1	$aQuintana Orsini, Carlos,$d1973-
	245  13 $aLa capitalización boliviana :$b(1994-2005) /$cCarlos Quintana Orsini.

The relationship between authority records and bibliographic records helps take the guesswork out of creating headings within bibliographic records.